Patience is a virtue! Especially if you have a job in education. That’s not just a broad generalization, though: if you do work as a teacher, your patience willget tested. Probably more often than you’d like.User u/12345burritoaskedthe teachers of Reddit to be honest about the moments that seriously made themquestiontheir students’ intelligence. Scroll down for some candid stories about the strangest things that kids have said or written in the classroom.Bored Pandagot in touch with the author of the viral discussion,u/12345burrito, and they were kind enough to share their thoughts about what teachers should be like and how students can catch up if they’ve fallen behind. You’ll find our full interview with them as you read on.This post may includeaffiliate links.
Patience is a virtue! Especially if you have a job in education. That’s not just a broad generalization, though: if you do work as a teacher, your patience willget tested. Probably more often than you’d like.
User u/12345burritoaskedthe teachers of Reddit to be honest about the moments that seriously made themquestiontheir students’ intelligence. Scroll down for some candid stories about the strangest things that kids have said or written in the classroom.
Bored Pandagot in touch with the author of the viral discussion,u/12345burrito, and they were kind enough to share their thoughts about what teachers should be like and how students can catch up if they’ve fallen behind. You’ll find our full interview with them as you read on.
This post may includeaffiliate links.
Handed out an exam…in University. 6 hands that went up instantly…I pointed to one of them and said “yes”. She asked “What does Surname mean?”…I paused, and answered it calmly…“it’s your last name”. The other 5 hands went down. I thought to myself….f**k we’ve lowered the bar.
According to Indeed, the average teacher working in the United Statesmakes$20.12 per hour or around $32,074 per year. Forbesreportsthat the average annual salary in the US is $59,428 per year or around $28.34 per hour. With this in mind, it’s clear that the average American teacher is grossly underpaid.Although money isn’t everything (a sense of purpose and career growth are also vital), you want your educators to feel stable about putting food on the table. If you want your educators to be patient,empathetic, and go the extra mile, you can’t have them worried about cash.
According to Indeed, the average teacher working in the United Statesmakes$20.12 per hour or around $32,074 per year. Forbesreportsthat the average annual salary in the US is $59,428 per year or around $28.34 per hour. With this in mind, it’s clear that the average American teacher is grossly underpaid.
Although money isn’t everything (a sense of purpose and career growth are also vital), you want your educators to feel stable about putting food on the table. If you want your educators to be patient,empathetic, and go the extra mile, you can’t have them worried about cash.
I mentioned bringing my lunch to work and a kid put up his hand to ask where I worked.Right after lunch. In class. Where I teach him.
I teach swimming lessons and lifeguarding courses. During one, I was trying to teach them cpr and instead of showing them first, I told them to show me what they already knew about it.I then proceeded to observe 15 16-20 year olds do the weirdest s**t to those poor training dolls. My favorite though was the kid who did a two foot jump onto the chest of the dummy. The dummy slid out from under his feet like a cartoon banana and he landed on his rear end on the pool deck. Good times.
If your teachers are underpaid, burned out, and overwhelmed, they mightnot havethe time, energy, or willpower to give struggling students the attention that they need to improve.However, let’s not forget that a teacher’s salary can vary a huge amount depending on where they’re based and what school they get a position in. How much experience you have is also going to affect your starting salary.For example, some of the highest-paying cities in the US include New York City (an average of $68,364 per year), Los Angeles ($66,820), and Chicago ($56,164).Though, that might be a mixed blessing. Sure, you may be earning more. But your cost of living is likely much higher in these cities, too. How much you end up saving will vary depending on your lifestyle, rent, etc. Eductors need a support system in place that goes beyond finances.
If your teachers are underpaid, burned out, and overwhelmed, they mightnot havethe time, energy, or willpower to give struggling students the attention that they need to improve.
However, let’s not forget that a teacher’s salary can vary a huge amount depending on where they’re based and what school they get a position in. How much experience you have is also going to affect your starting salary.
For example, some of the highest-paying cities in the US include New York City (an average of $68,364 per year), Los Angeles ($66,820), and Chicago ($56,164).
Though, that might be a mixed blessing. Sure, you may be earning more. But your cost of living is likely much higher in these cities, too. How much you end up saving will vary depending on your lifestyle, rent, etc. Eductors need a support system in place that goes beyond finances.
I teach Intro. Geology. I gave a lab quiz on the Density and Buoyancy lab we had done the week before. One of the questions asked how are we able to build ships out of steel, considering that we measured steel to be more dense than water the week before.Almost the entire class gave variants of “The ocean is so big compared to a boat, that all the water is able to keep the boat afloat . . .” as an answer. I get some version of this answer every semester, but it really struck me because so many of them put it. (And they weren’t just copying each other.)This school happens to be right next to a bay. So I took a large, uninteresting rock from the prep room and marched the students outside to the bay. I said “This rock is about 8 kilos and has a density of about 2.4 g/cc. But, according to your last test responses, the bay is so big that it should float . . .” I threw the rock into the bay and we all patiently waited for it to bob back up to the surface.
I have a poster on my wall that says something about not believing everything you read on the internet, and it attributes the quote to Abraham Lincoln. Student said, “Wait, did they have internet back then?”.
College instructor, you would be shocked. Just last year: multiple students can’t save word docs as pdfs, students take smartphone pictures of every single slide while I lecture even though I upload them to our LMS. Personal favorite: when asked to insert a picture into a word document, one student prints the word doc, prints the picture, puts the picture on the word doc, takes a smartphone picture and uploads the file.Miss my millennial students.
We were interested in getting the OP’s personal perspective on what a truly good educator is like. “A great teacher for me is one who is patient and will always try their hardest to ensure that all students are gaining the knowledge. They are open to all questions and viewpoints, listen to each one, and respect them,” redditor u/12345burrito told Bored Panda.“They are patient, kind, and understanding of all students. Bonus points if they are easily reliable (via email or phone) and have a perfect balance between discipline while still maintaining leniency.“According to the author of the thread, students who feel like they’ve fallen behind their classmates in their studies shouldn’t be afraid of reaching out for help. It’s one of the best things they can do to get back ahead. Being proactive is a massive plus here.
We were interested in getting the OP’s personal perspective on what a truly good educator is like. “A great teacher for me is one who is patient and will always try their hardest to ensure that all students are gaining the knowledge. They are open to all questions and viewpoints, listen to each one, and respect them,” redditor u/12345burrito told Bored Panda.
“They are patient, kind, and understanding of all students. Bonus points if they are easily reliable (via email or phone) and have a perfect balance between discipline while still maintaining leniency.”
According to the author of the thread, students who feel like they’ve fallen behind their classmates in their studies shouldn’t be afraid of reaching out for help. It’s one of the best things they can do to get back ahead. Being proactive is a massive plus here.
One of my 16 year old students asked, while starting a multiple choice test, if it mattered what letter he chose. I just stared at him. Sometimes there are no words.
My class had a math test over polygons. So I was grading their tests and one of the throw away multiple choice answers was fiveagon. I laughed out loud, so my class naturally asked me what was so funny. I told them that no one could be that silly as to pick fiveagon as an answer. I immediately saw one kid slouch really low in his seat and about three papers latter I realized why. He had answered fiveagon for pentagon. I felt like the worst teacher in the world. After class, I went up to him and apologized. He said not to worry but I could tell it made him feel bad. I never forgave myself for that one. I now grade papers after school.
In the intro of a paper, a kid (8th grade, teenager) wrote “In this SA, I’m going to explain…” and throughout the paper he wrote “SA” several more times.He meant essay. S-A. This kid’s first language is English. I had literally no words.
“Email the professor, visit their office hours, maybe stay a few minutes after class to help go over things. I know a lot of students feel afraid to, but once they get into the habit of it, doing so will feel like a normal thing for them. I myself would feel afraid at times to reach out to the professor, but honestly, at the end of the day, being brave and taking that step is the best thing you can do,” they told Bored Panda.
One of my sixth graders had a brain fart moment. Couldn’t remember the word for ‘suspenders’. Called them farmer straps (complete with hooking his thumbs through his imaginary suspenders and moving his hands up and down, like an old guy wearing suspenders might do), and I laughed so hard I cried and almost fell outta my damn chair.
Not my story, but my Brothers. I still chuckle about itHe taught at a trade school, and he’s a super nice, patient guy. One of his students calls in him in a panic that she can’t get to school bc of a flat tire, she’a frantic and has no one else to call for help - np, this will be a good teaching moment,So he drives out to help her, and as he’s examining the tire, explains to her that the she’s got a nail right in the top, and is going to show her how to change itShe scoffs at him, rolls her eyes, and proceeds to tell him that that’s absolutely impossible bc the tire is flat on the BOTTOM, not the top where the nail is….Needless to say, my brother didn’t even bother explaining to her how to change the tire…
I teach on the college level and students try to convince me dumb stuff is true a lot. At least once a semester a student will try to fight with me saying Africa is a country.
“When daydreaming, I always spend a lot of time thinking of random hypothetical questions or scenarios in my head a lot. It’s the reason why r/AskReddit and r/NoStupidQuestions are always some of my favorite places to browse on to see what kind of random content they have but also to post questions myself when bored,” they opened up.
Watching a video about dinosaurs. A 13 yo asks ‘how did they get video of real dinosaurs if they are all dead?’ Same girl also wanted to know how Mayans communicated with each other if they had no cell phones or ‘wall phones’ as she called them. Yeah. And my evaluation and raises depend on these kids.
When teaching a health class to sixth grade girls and having to stop and explain that babies don’t actually grow in a stomach and they have 3 exits in their nether regions.They literally had no clue about their own anatomy.Parents, please talk to your children about this stuff. Get them a book. Something. They need to know this stuff.
My dad is a history teacher and he had a student tell him the statue of liberty was in pearl harbor.
I asked my class of 5th graders what city they live in, and the first response was “Texas”.
Student 1: yeah, my aunt had cancer, and my mom, and my grandma.Student 2: wow, that’s awful, do you think you’ll get it as a result? Is it hereditary?Student 1: nah, it’s not hereditary, its genetic.Freshman in College.
I teach science. Sometimes I teach remedial science so I have to hype up my lessons. When students start showing an interest in things I get super excited and help support their interests as best I can. A girl came to my desk wearing a cute white marshmallow jacket with a NASA symbol on the back. I said “oh, super cool of you to be repping NASA!” Her response “Thanks, it’s a cool new brand everyone is wearing.” I asked a few more questions and turns out, she seriously didn’t know what NASA was! She was 18 years old.Another story - two kids just talking to each other working on laptops. Silence for a few minutes, typing etc. Then randomly, one boy says, “if mandarin is a fruit, how do people speak it?” He was 16, and dead serious.
University course - paper on Witches - spelt Which throughout the whole paper. Favorite sentence - Whiches and broomsticks. footnoted a phone number as a source!Marking those papers broke me.
How can I type lowercase ‘a’? All I have in my keyboard are capital letters.
Not a teacher, but this is from when I saw a Teacher’s face which clearly showed it.Blonde Girl [Literally the stereotypical bimbo; bottom in all ability sets and dumb as a brick; but Geography wasn’t in ability classes] in my Year 9 [13~14 y/o] Geography Class:“How are we in Europe? I thought we were in America.“We’re in the UKThe Geography teacher had a look of pure horror and despair. Bonus points since we were his first class at that school.
My students tried turning in plagiarized papers. Unfortunately they’re so dumb that they neither bothered changing the file name or paraphrasing the content. I think almost 50% of the kids in class sent me the same paper over and over again. Spelling mistakes and all.
Kids at lab tables.Suddenly, there is a bright blue flash and a loud pop.I turn and look directly at a kid, still holding a pair of scissors and a now severed laptop cord, his eyes wide.“I didn’t realize it would do that.”.
Don’t know if this counts, but I was a TA for a semester in grad school (never again). One student submitted this paper I will never forget. Basically, the author was wrong because the student found the argument “boring.” In explaining the author’s argument, he got most points wrong and then proceeded to say he had a better argument. His argument WAS the author’s argument.
I asked my students to write a sentence and give an example.One of the students (age 12/13) asked “what’s an example?“Actually really hard to explain.
“When did the world change from black and white to color?” They honestly believed that from like 1970 (when color photography became prominent in publications) to THE BEGINNING OF TIME, humans lived in a totally black and white world.
One of my third graders pointed at the moon in the sky and asked, “Is that the Phillipines?”.
A classmate of mine in elementary school had this exchange with our teacher:“What’s the answer to this [multiple choice question with 3 choices]?““A?““no"“C?““no"“I don’t know.”.
Me: I’m thinking of a fruit that is yellow and very sour!Student: Chickenpox!
For women’s history month, I had my students give presentations on famous women in history. One student got up and, dead serious, gave a presentation on “Anne Franklin” and said that “the holocaust was a guy called Hitler.” She had researched all of this. I still don’t understand.
An old friend of mine used to be a tutor. She had her math notes out. She used to use “#” instead of writing “number”.One of the kids saw and they all kept asking she put hashtags everywhere. Even whem she explained it, they kept saying “no, idiot. Its a hashtag.“Gotta love middle schoolers.
Not a teacher, but a friend of mine once said that Internet is a liquid. Not the dumbest thing she said, but the only one I can remember.
I was talking about CFL lightbulbs and the fact that they contain mercury. One high school freshman raised his hand and asked if they had to go to Mercury to get it.
Teaching Assistant (of French) here. Once I have asked my students to choose a word and then to describe/define it to the class so that someone could guess the word (it helps to remember and learn their vocabulary). They all thought they were supposed to describe the word “word” and then they didn’t understand who could win the game as they all knew the word they had to guess….
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When I TA’d chemistry in college I had marks on the whiteboard to keep track of how many times I said “Don’t lick that” through the semester. It was…a lot.
Once I was grading tests about Cold War. The question asked who were involved in said war. Most of the kids answers were “USSR which fighted for communism” ok, so far so good. “and the USA fighting for socialism” what?The same test had answers about how the Missil Crisis was a social movement, kids saying that USA was communist, and a kid that said that every country till 1970 was a monarchy and democracy wasn’t a thing yet.I quit teaching a few years later. Kids are stupid beyond any repair.
I’m a student and in my physics the teacher was explaining how space is a big vacuum and one student was super confused and after asking some questoons it eventually became clear he was thinking of a vacuum cleaner.
I teach almost exclusively college freshmen.A few years back, one said she didn’t believe in science.One said “who is Paul McCartney” out loud (more ignorance than stupid but STILL)One said “I didn’t know ‘Houston we have a problem’ is from a movie” bc he had heard it so many times elsewhere.One student emailed me and tried to get me to excuse his absence because his friends pet rabbit got out and he wanted to help find it.One student could not grasp that they needed to use first person pronouns in a personal essay so they kept referring to themselves in third person.One student (my very first semester teaching) wrote his personal essay about his ex girlfriend and said that he wished he had gotten her pregnant before he went to college bc then they would still be together.I could go onEdit: one got real mad bc I said something about buffalo roaming free and she yells BUFFALOS DON’T EXIST and I was so shocked I let the classroom get a little out of control but 15 minutes later we discovered that a teacher in her past said in no uncertain terms that all Buffalo were extinct.
I use the name Benny McStudent for all of my sample work, and I always have a few students who ask if he is a real student.
During a spelling test last year, I said a word three times and a student asked, “Miss, how do you spell that?”.
College teacher here, one of my students who was finishing up writing their thesis emailed me saying: “they just told me I haven’t finished all my courses yet, so I can’t graduate.” He honestly was mad at the guy who noticed the 8 (!!!) courses he hadn’t finished yet, like it was the guys fault for not handing in HIS assignments.HOW ARE YOU BLAMING THE PEOPLE WHO TOLD YOU AND WHY HAVEN’T YOU CHECKED YOUR STUDY PROGRESS IN THE LAST 3 YEARS?Edit: can = can’t.
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“George Clooney was the first president right?” 10th grader"Coach (I was a bball coach as well for a high school), our bio teacher was talking about menstrual cycles. What is that?” 9th grade female"Coach, I walked into the weirdest (women’s) restroom. There were toilets with no stalls. I couldn’t figure out how to pee in them” “you walked into the men’s bathroom. Those were urinals you saw” “oh… How to men pee in them?” same 9th grade female"what is Vladimir Lenin’s first name?” 8th grader (I replied Joseph)“Does a male octopus have 8 testicles?” 9th grade boy, in history class.
Not a teacher, but I was surprised when a classmate didn’t know what continent we lived on in 7^(th) grade.
Grade 10 Student: Sir, my calculator is broken. When I do 11x1 it gives me the same number (11)!Me: so what is the problem?Grade 10 Student: It does the same thing for all the numbers! (And proceeds to show me 6x1=6, 7x1 = 7 etc)Me:…
I had a kid tell me Friday that the Rhinoceros is the last living dinosaur. I told him it wasn’t a dinosaur, he said yeah it was.. “Tyranno-SAURUS…. Rhino-SAURUS.. see? Same thing.” - he’s 16 - I teach at a DYS facility.
Taught really, really, really, remedial math in NYC High School. Always looked for reason for students incorrect answers to help them understand. One student gave the answer ‘2’ to a question that in no way could come to that result. OK. Going through few more papers, same question, same answer appears. Hmm, cheating? While handing out papers next day, I casually asked one student how he arrived at the answer ‘2?’ Response: My teacher, that phrase always meant they were referring to their Middle School teacher, always said to guess if I didn’t know the answer, but don’t guess the first answer because that’s probably not right. Is it apparent to you they are talking about taking a multiple choice test here? Well, boy genius has ‘translated’ this bit of educational nonsense into guessing ‘2’ for anything he didn’t know. Never bothered to ask the second kid! BTW, I had finally decided to give only True/False exams, and partial credit. Still couldn’t get passing marks for most kids.
I’m not a teacher but when I was 13, someone in my class asked the teacher how to spell DNA.
I had a 9th grader tell me that everyone is born with cancer, and that most people just grow out of it.
We’re discussing the industrial revolution. I’m going around the class asking kids things we wouldn’t have without factories.This one girl, with ludicrous confidence, answers “DOGS.”The whole room went kinda quiet. Everyone just looked at her. She follows up with “what?”That class was interesting.
In the same class hour, the same student not only tore apart a pen and covered himself with ink, he pulled the spring apart and clamped it down on his tongue. It cut him so deep, he couldn’t get it off. He them somehow managed to dig a pencil into his hand and then the lead broke off inside him. It was like every moment I looked over, he had hurt himself in another way.
On a regular basis, my freshmen students cannot work a pencil sharpener. It all started with a regular, old school sharpener screwed onto a counter. But, within days they broke it. So, I bought an electric powered sharpener. I always get a ‘Mr., the sharpener isn’t working’. Me: ‘what’s the problem?’ Usually a) lead stuck inside b)its clogged up from all of the pencil waste. In either case they always ask ‘what should I do?’ My response is the same every time, ‘I don’t know. Figure it out.’ They never do and put the sharpener back down. Usually, resulting in them borrowing a pen from a classmate. It’s both ridiculously hilarious and pathetic.
University first year biology student. Lab lesson comparing structures of plants. Upon examining a basil plant: “You can eat that? But it’s just leaves!”.
Geography teacher here…I might have mentioned some of these before.1. Student handed in a paper on the moon. Most of it was astrology. Dad helped her write it.2. Student had to write paper on Mars. Handed in the Wikipedia page on Mars. Not edited or anything.3. Flat-earther… Need I say more?4. Student was adamant that giants once walked the earth. She could know because she had seen a documentary.5. Student believed humans and dinosaurs had once co-existed.6. 2 students couldn’t find Great-Britain on a map of Europe. (we’re in West-Europe) One pointed to the south of France and then Norway, the other just stared at the map. They were seniors.7. Caught a student plagiarizing on a paper. He got mummy involved to prove me otherwise. By the time I was finished with him, it turned out that there were 2 sentences not plagiarized…8. Had a student thinking that a continent and a country were the same thing. I think we all know what she believed about Africa.9. Had one student who didn’t understand why the planets didn’t fall out of space.10. I had 2 students sketch a solar eclipse as moon - sun - earth. (I responded that this would be the apocalypse)I’m probably forgetting at least another 10 or so…
Not a teacher, but a girl in my class asked my geography teacher that if we had another ice age, would dinosaurs come back.
Had a classmate who didn’t know which religion Jesus was worshipped in. She was Catholic.
I wouldn’t call him dumb but I did stop and stare at him thinking it was a joke.When I was student teaching last year one of my students made a comment about the 52 states- I corrected him and said there are 50 states and he asked me if I remembered to count both Washingtons. As in Washington and Washington, D.C.
Not a teacher, but a girl in my college bio class asked, “If a woman doesn’t have a uterus, how does she go to the bathroom?”.
I teach high school. During a lab I told my students to use string for something and I told them to tie the string in a knot. They legit responded “we aren’t boy scouts, we cant tie knots”.
2 moments come to mind.One high school student spelled “if” and “turtle” wrong and they were in honors English.Another high school student in AP US History signed a Constitution created with their small group, and she made her autograph as fancy and large as possible like John Hancock. She turned to me and said “Look, I made my autograph like John Quincy Adams!”.
I had a student put a Geiger counter in a microwave then turn it on to measure “nuclear radiation.”.
None of my students have ever been “dumb” but they had brain farts at times.I was teaching in the East End of London in a school that was 98% Bengali.I had one lesson about our names and that they have meanings to our families, culture, or in other languages etc. I shared why my name was what it was and the meaning behind it.Some children were sharing about their names. One of my students got very excited and yelled out “what does my name mean?” The whole class did a face palm. His name was Mohamed.
Not me, but my wife is a secondary school (high school) teacher.One of her students (let’s call this student Jenny) had a reputation for not being the sharpest knife in the drawer, but this was on another level.Jenny was stood in the corridor staring at a wall-atlas.After a while, my wife approached her and asked if she was ok.Still staring at the atlas, Jenny, in total seriousness, says “Miss, what’s on the other side?”My wife had to walk away to avoid laughing in her face.
Not a teacher, but was helping my friend who’s a TA go over some first year essays. It was an essay about video games, and aside from the format being nonexistent, one of the first sentences was something along the lines of “There are many examples of video games, such as the Wii and PS4 and Zelda”. Unfortunately, she wasn’t allowed to grade any papers below 50%. He got a 50%.
4th grade here- half of my class this past year never heard of Hitler- Assignment was to “describe how you know that Ramona loves her mother.” Kid submits a list of 10 things that babies like their mothers to feed them. Heeeeey buddy, I think you misunderstood the assignment.- every year only about half of them know how to read an analog clock. This is supposed to be taught in first grade. I just have that in my lessons every year now.- a girl thought that the idea of lice living in her hair was “cute”- while coaching track I gave a kid a rake to rake out the sand in the long jump pit. He just stood there looking at it. I asked him if he knew what it was and he said that he knows it’s a rake but he doesn’t know how to use it. I told him to figure it out and he honestly didn’t know what to do with the thing.
Y1/2 (5-7 year old) assembly, the Mayor of our town comes in to present an award and speak to the kids. She’s wearing ceremonial robes. Explains the whole Mayor thing and what her job is etc. Kid puts hand up and asks “are you Henry the 8th?”.
One of my seniors had to solve a single variable equation (isolate the variable). I tried walking him through it, and asked what the opposite of subtraction was. He looked at me like I was an idiot and said, “DUH-VISION.”.
I teach college in the UK so 16-18 year olds. Mainly teach Maths resit so they’ve failed before but no excuse. Group of them having an argument, I go over and ask what’s wrong. Majority of them trying to tell one student that you get 10 marks on every exam just for writing your name and ID number on the front. Other one only disagreed because he said last time got less than that on the exam….. Marks just for correctly filling out your name…
We were doing some school culture lessons at the start of the year. Part of it was about respecting the school. A leading question I asked my 9th graders was “How much do you think it cost to build the school?” The highest one guessed $50,000 and the lowest was $5,000. It was a school that housed more than 2,000 students.
8th grade: We were having student-teacher debates in a mock-up of labor unions. Half the class were teachers, the other half were students. In this particular incident, we were arguing about whether students should receive harsher punishments for swearing in the halls. The debate was going along pretty well, until one of my friends, who was leading the opposing side, and I’ll never forget this, said, ‘Well, you hear people dropping [N-words] in the halls all the time-’ She quickly realized her mistake, but everyone else, including myself, just kind of pointed and said ;OHHH!!!' The debates were brought to a quick end after that, but I must have been in hysterics for the rest of the period.10th grade: We were in biology having a discussion about animals and the reproductive cycle. Another one of my friends literally didn’t know chickens mate. She even tried to say that she just thought that chickens laid eggs randomly. I was probably in hysterics for a good while afterwards.
I teach Animation (Adobe Flash) as a summer job every year.One time, one of my students raised his hand and I come over to see some alert on his screen. He goes, “How do I click ‘ok’?”I was so baffled at his question that I just walked away.
About five chapters into “To Kill a Mockingbird” a student asked me, “Who is this ‘Scout’ kid, again?“TKAM gives me a LOT of these moments from the kids who don’t bother reading–for example, I have a quiz in which there’s the following question–“Who is Tim Johnson?” and the answer is a neighborhood dog that gets rabies, and Atticus Finch kills him. Occasionally I’ll get, “He’s Scout’s dad” or “He’s a family friend of the Finch’s”…
One of my kids asked how she should answer a question about winter because there’s no character in the poem named winter. The question said ‘writer’.
A story from a football coach I worked with:He said August practice was from 10-2. A player shows up at 1:50. Coach said to him “You’re late. There’s only 10 minutes of practice left”. Student “but you said practice was at 10 to 2 aka 1:50"True story.
Three weeks into writing a research paper.“Okay today we’ll continue writing the body paragraphs of the essay.“Student: “What essay?”.
I teach computer science. At GCSE level students have to learn 4 data types. Integer (whole numbers), real (decimal numbers), Boolean (true or false) and string(a collection of characters). We had done 4 lessons on this because some of the group are a little less able. First thing lesson 5 I ask a student who we shall call Ade, to name the data type we would use for the number 47 (correct answer integer, acceptable answer with explanation …real). Ade answers “bi”. Puzzled I ask another student the same question. Integer he replies. I go back to Ade for the answer and he replies…..“Bi”. I write integer on the whiteboard in 8 inch high letters, point to it and ask the question again. Ade replies……“Bi”. I explain to him that the number 47 is a whole number and all whole numbers can be stored as type integer. I ask what data type we would use for the number 47 and he replies “Integer”. Brilliant. I ask what data type we would use for the number 48 and the little darling replies………….“Bi”. By now the whole group was in tears so we moved on. One year later he still can not identify even the simplest of data types.
One time a guy in class didn’t know the answer to the equation, so the teacher gave him hints, after so many hints he still couldn’t come up with an answer, to this day I still remember his reaction, the teacher got so angry he literally called the poor kid an [R-word].
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