Category Archives: humor, classroom humor, childhood, school,

and then the Greeks built a giant talking fiberglas trout, with which they would deceive the Trojans

sometimes to see who cheats, or to entertain myself, I make different versions of the same test. I scramble the order of the answers and don’t tell the class. I also sometimes put such absurd choices down that the student is really only left with one or two options.

BUT ….for this to work, you have to actually read  the questions.

I  gave  a short quiz on the Trojan war. Most people got an A or B.  A  few took it several days later when I changed the order of the answers.

Question: Troy was in present day:   a) Turkey  b) Roast beef   c) Greece   d) Italy

Question: the Trojans were tricked by: a) a giant wooden duck   b) a talking fiberglas trout

c) a jack in the box    d) a giant wooden horse   ( is this question a gift, or what?)

Question: the king was married to:  a) male name of enemy   b) male name of enemy

c) male name of enemy      d)woman’s name

People who took the test later wrote down the exact letters for a perfect score. IF you were taking  the first test. Here are their answers.

  •   the Trojans were deceived by a talking fiberglas trout
  •  the king was married to another guy who happened to be the enemy
  •  Troy was located in present day roast beef.
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the good citizenship club

When I was in 7th grade, all the homerooms had a club. There was a drama club, a science club, a math club. But our homeroom?

We had the ” Good Citizenship Club.”

Yep, that club was a laugh a minute.  The brain child of our homeroom teacher who frequently told us that she had never missed a day of school.  ( WHY?????)

All I could think was, ”  And you’re bragging about it?  What a lot of wasted opportunities.”

Our club activities consisted of dropping suggestions into a box, along the lines of

“We shouldn’t slam our desks”  and voting on them.

One student offered the following anonymous comment.

Check happy referred to her habit of writing checks next to our  names for any infraction.

This note put her into a frenzy.

“Everyone write down who they think wrote this, and then I’ll question them.”   ( you mean interrogate, don’t you?)

I wrote ” Probably any of us, really”

Guess whose name showed up the most?

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channeling Ferris

Watching Ferris Bueller at home one Sunday with my husband. During the scene with Ben Stein, when he drones on about the Smoot Hawley tariff act, there are multiple closeups of dazed and drooling students, eyes fixed on some point in another galaxy.

I fell off the couch crying with laughter. My husband just looked at me convulsing on the floor.

“Apparently you relate to this movie.”

“Yes.”

My solution to sleeping students is to talk about bringing ice cubes or blue eyeshadow to class. They bolt upright. I never say how exactly these items might be employed. Such is the power of imagination.

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your life is in their hands

One side effect of growing older is that sooner or later, everyone younger than you looks about twelve years old. This is particularly disturbing when one of those people is your surgeon.

First time I met this guy I thought, “Oh no. it’s Doogie Hawser.”  I couldn’t help myself.

“Umm, I hope you don’t mind my asking this, but how long have you been doing this?”

Another time, in a teaching hospital, a doctor walked in my exam room0 with two medical students, neither of whom was old enough to drive.   ( you had to be there)

The doctor was enthusiastic. He rattled off the particulars of my case, and then looked at them expectantly for comment.  The boy stared at the ceiling.  The girl stared so intently at the doctor she started to squint.

” Predni zooone?”   Even I knew that answer made  no sense. The doctor was undaunted.  He rattled off some more symptoms.

The boy never took his eyes off the ceiling.  The girl squinted intensely. She looked like her eyeballs hurt. She wanted very badly to say something intelligent.

” Is it  blood pressure???”

The doctor smiled benignly. ” You two will read all about this tonight.”      He looked so sure I figured he hadn’t been doing this teaching thing very long.

They left. In two or three years, someone’s life will be in their hands.

I think of this when some big cheerful clueless kid walks into a wall. Some day he’ll be a neurosurgeon. Maybe mine.

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the Christmas guillotine

My husband built me a guillotine.

My old one fell apart.

Ok, it wasn’t actually my guillotine. It was my dad’s. He got it for a Christmas present.( The blade was wooden though. Poser.)

This was in addition to:

  • the psychedelic toilet seat
  •  the giant tortoise shell ( before it was illegal to acquire such things)
  •  the Hungarian fencing sabers
  •  the weather vane
  •  the branding iron with his initials.

Somehow a tradition started to see if he could guess  what his Christmas present was by playing twenty questions.  He guessed the toilet seat on the third guess. He guessed every single one.

The guillotine went to good use. It sat outside our front porch on Halloween.

When it fell apart, my husband built me a new one.

That’s love.

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Harriet the Spy and her acolytes

My best friend and I read Harriet the Spy obsessively. We took to spying on our friends. Then, she took to spying on me.

My house was very very long, an old English Tudor style with a fragile slate roof.  One afternoon I glanced out my bedroom window. She was crouching out there on the slanted slate roof, which she could only have accessed by climbing up onto a porch, then onto a garage roof, then onto the main roof, and crawling about 80 feet.

Our house had a panel in the wall, really a secret panel, that opened onto a shaft about 30 inches square.  It went from the basement to the first floor. Looked like it might have been a dumbwaiter.

One day my mother was walking by and heard a noise. She opened up the door and there was Scuz, holding on to the wall, with a notebook.

“SHHH. Don’t tell her I’m in here.”

My mother shrugged and shut the panel. She didn’t even tell me about it for about ten years.

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