Middle of grammar lesson.
Hand is raised.
“Magistra?”
“Yes?”
“When you go to McDonalds, do they give you extra napkins or do you have to go get your own?”
Category Archives: humor, classroom humor, childhood, school,
laughing at homework
“ I never had a teacher laugh at my homework before.”
the flying pig circus
Had a student who brought her boyfriend to meet the family. They politely inquired about his plans for the future. In a moment of uncontrolled whimsy he said,
“I want to own a pig circus.”
With themed foods, no less. He waxed eloquent.
Pork funnel cake.
Whipped bacon flavored cotton candy.
Pigs leaping through hoops of fire.
The girl punished him by making him get a job.
barometric pressure
My husband used to sleeptalk. Eyes wide open.
One night as I was almost in a dream, my husband rolled over, sat up, and said cheerfully,
” Did I ever tell you about how barometric pressure works? It’s really fascinating.”
I rolled over and pulled my eyelids open. It was 1:oo A.M.
” Ummm, could you tell me about this in the morning?”
“WELL!!” in an injured and aggrieved voice. “I thought you would have wanted to know.”
Whereupon he grabbed the blanket, rolled over and went back to sleep. Assuming he was actually awake during this transaction,
which left me wide awake, staring at the ceiling, blanketless, wondering,
“what the hell just happened?”
To this day he won’t explain barometric pressure to me. “You had your chance.”
thats one way of looking at it
After translating, a girl looked at the book with a puzzled frown.
“Wow. Latin is like really bad English.” ( Her classmates loved her for this. So do I)
This, however, may be the best.
” Latin. Its almost like a foreign language.”
That’s one way of looking at it.
Not heard in the classroom or NAIL THAT SUCKER TO THE FLOOR
My husband once made the cardinal error of suggesting that, should I run out of things to write about, I could write about him.
Be careful what you innocently and generously offer your wife.
As anyone who has ever been in my house or classroom knows, I am not a paragon of organization. I try a little bit harder with actual cleanliness issues, but hey, I’m doing my best. Or something like that.
Anyway, the point here is that I had an objection to his underwear on the floor. All of which were inches from the hamper. No wonder he never made it into the NBA.
I pointed this out to my husband a few times, who may or may not have listened to me.
Many years ago I chastised a male friend for cavalierly commenting that he wasn’t listening when his wife told him something of interest. He looked at me very seriously and said,
“Well, does your husband listen when you talk?”
So, I went and got a hammer and nailed his underwear to the floor. At least three pairs.
He didn’t notice for four days.
When he did notice, he just went and got a hammer and calmly pulled the nails out of the carpet.
A week later I picked up all his dirty socks, which were tossed decoratively around the hamper on the floor like offerings to a household god, and put them in the drawer with the clean socks.
“Do you know how all these dirty socks got in my sock drawer?” A voice over from the Exorcist answered.
“I PUT THEM THERE”
” Oh, ok. Fine. No problem. I was just wondering.”
Lest you consider trying this novel approach yourself, consider that all that came of it was a good anecdote, and I have a husband with a sense of humor. But I’ve heard people get great results using crazy glue. If you have, please post a comment and let me know.
Grab ’em by the genitives
One day, after explaining what I’m sure was some exquisitely boring grammatical detail, a boy leaned forward intently, chin on fist, and said,
“In other words, you just gotta grab them by the genitives and twist them till they conjugate.”
disrobing
A disturbing number of boys have requested leave to disrobe and change in the classroom. To me this is the stuff of nightmares, finding yourself in a public place with no clothes on. I say no.
A class was filming a project. We were in the back of the school and I was watching the filming when I heard a door open and the principal came out. And that is when I realized that:
a) we were filming in front of an immense glass window
b) three of the boys had removed their pants and were standing around in their boxer shorts.
The principal, ( who was also a rabbi. somehow that makes it worse) had seen the boys through the large window and had come out to question them on their lack of attire. With perfect aplomb and straight faces they told him that this was required as costuming for their part in the film.
I grabbed a script and wandered off trying desperately to look busy. The principal didn’t know what to say. You could almost see him grabbing at responses and then discarding them. Finally, at a loss for words, he went back in the building.
The god Poseidon was in the script. The line read, ” As king of the sea, it is only fitting that the largest fish be mine.” The prop the student brought in was a small marlin or sailfish trophy. Which he stuck in his belt, the head and bill protruding out. Points for a visual metaphor.
On the plus side, he still had his pants on.
the ablative of sportsmanship
My high school science class was taught by a joyless woman with short hair, glasses and beady eyes. We called her the mad scientist. I postulated that a microbe had landed in her terrarium one day and went wild. And there she was. The final product.
I recall my sense of hopelessness in that class. I just had no idea what to do. Latin grammar is for many of my students what earth science was for me. BORING. I warn them.
“YO! BORING STUFF STRAIGHT AHEAD. LISTEN UP. PROP YOUR EYELIDS OPEN.”
The brain starts to gel. You lose the first couple of sentences, and then suddenly you wake up to someone saying
“ But the passive infinitive endings in third conjugation “
Or maybe “ So would this be the ablative of agent or the ablative of instrument?”
You, dear reader, if Latin was never inflicted on you ( Did I really just say that? Shame on me) are possibly wondering
“ What the hell is an ablative?”
Or maybe, seeing the words conjugation and infinitive, you just skipped this whole paragraph. GET BACK HERE. I promise that any grammar you read about here you can instantly forget.
SHORT BORING EXPLANATION:
See, in Latin, you can say things in pretty much any word order you want, and its going to mean the same thing all the time. Whereas, in English, if you take words John cooked Mary dinner and switch them around, maybe Mary is cooking dinner or the dinner cooked John. However, because Latin puts a little code at the end of each word, the sentence will always be John cooked Mary dinner, even if the word order says Mary dinner John cooked. The codes are called case endings, and ablative is the name of a case. There are lots of ablatives. Ablative of price, of time, accompaniment, means and instrument, comparison, agent, et cetera. WAKE UP. Thank you.
One day I presented the ablative of respect. At that time, we had a school wide character education project. Every month had a word for character: integrity, honesty, compassion, loyalty, and so on. When I came up with the ablative of respect, they just didn’t believe me. One girl gave a loud whoop of laughter.
“ ABLATIVE OF RESPECT?? Whats next? The ablative of sportsmanship?” (wait till she finds out about ethical datives)
Occasionally I say it out loud.
What do I do? I teach the grammatical complexities of a language no one has spoken for several centuries. So, what do you do?
Swords or pistols? or a dictionary?
A shy student lost his shyness and became aggressive in class, questioning me on points of fact every chance he got. I had occasionally encountered this before. It was demoralizing and terrifying when you weren’t sure of what you were doing.
However, I pretty much knew what I was doing. Well, in Latin, anyway. Ok , I knew more than they did. Alright, I fake it pretty well. When a kid asked why I didn’t know what a Latin word meant, I hauled out the BIG Merriam Webster English dictionary.
“ You know all the words in here, right? Well, how about half? Ten pages? Hey, isn’t English your native tongue? You don’t know all the words?”
But this kid challenged me on more than just word meanings. Sometimes it was grammar, mythology,or the time of day. It annoyed the other kids after awhile. Finally one day I wrote my name and his on the board and sectioned it off like a score board, writing my name much larger, of course.
Used this same technique on five year olds. Its very versatile.
He wasn’t the only one who challenged me. (the context in which I use the word challenge is not as in intellectually challenging. More like challenge to a duel. Swords or pistols?) Another student corrected my pronunciation of a five syllable word, irrevocable.
There was a strained silence in the classroom. I’m not omniscient. We looked the word up. We were both wrong.
Often I was grilled on English vocabulary I taught them. They assumed that if they had never heard or read a word, it didn’t exist and I had just made it up on the spot. So I offered,“You want to bet your grade on it?”
Some poor fool always took me up on it. Dictionaries were tossed through the air. (My husband once argued with me on misanthrope. I was right. He was wrong. There was no way to penalize him, though.)
I wrote thirty words on the board. Three of them I made up. They had to identify the fake words.
No one ever thought to actually look the words up.
( I had to check myself. You would be surprised at what is considered a word.)
Kerfuffle is my favorite real word. My favorite fake word is arismatic.
Heard in the Classroom 