On my fifth grade report card I found this comment.
” She seems to be in a state of hostility towards authority.”
I was nine.
Things might not have changed much.
Tag Archives: classroom humor
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.
laughing at homework
“ I never had a teacher laugh at my homework before.”
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.
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.”
the happy little cow
Mostly what I remember about my high school years was that I didn’t have the faintest idea what was going on in class. No idea in algebra, which I believe I had three times, no clue in earth science. I was marginally more clued in Mechanical Drawing, and I did know what was going on English class. This is what I remember from Freshman English.
I was chewing gum. The boy next to me was my next door neighbor. He had hardly spoken to me since we were best friends at the age of 5 and sailed leaf boats in the gutter together. The English teacher was talking about Pippi Longstocking. She caught my jaw moving.
“ You spit that gum out. You’re over there chewing your cud like a happy little cow.”
David (my neighbor) looked at me completely deadpan. “Are you a happy little cow? Are you really a happy little cow?” His first words to me since we were five. The last until our twentieth reunion.
I have taught all my classes how to say laeta parva vacca sum. I am a happy little cow. It commemorates that moment in English.
walk through the underworld
Our induction ceremony (we can’t say initiation. ) was a symbolic trip through the underworld, beginning with a barefoot walk in the river Styx, a pan full of ice cubes and marshmallows.
There is an association manual with suggestions for the ceremony, including handing the initiate ( oops, inductee) the eye of the Cyclops. A troublemaker mother organized the event. Same mom who provided the blue eyeshadow.
What blue eyeshadow? Go back and read all the older posts right now or you’ll have them for breakfast.
“I wasn’t sure where I could get enough eyeballs for everyone, but I thought about a wholesale butcher shop”
Her son commented,“ Yeah, but when they take off the blindfold and see what they have in their hands they’ll freak out and throw it”
Me: “Wait a minute. Aren’t these like, Halloween candy gum eyeballs? We’re using REAL EYEBALLS?”
“Well, “ she said, “the manual says eyeballs, and I’m not sure I can get enough. They must have sheep or cow eyeballs at a butcher shop”
I envisioned students screaming and hurling real eyeballs into my classroom walls and then the slime not being totally cleaned up.
( It sure wasn’t going to be me cleaning them up. Suppose they watched you while you scraped them off?) The eventual smell of rotting eyeballs….I couldn’t even look at a disembodied eyeball, much less go buy a bag of them and use them to torment adolescents.
I love this woman.
But we used plastic.
The unexpected visit
The supervisor appeared in my room one day half way through the lesson.
He sat himself at my desk. I continued the lesson and handed him the textbook, open to the translation. He motioned me over. The classroom was originally a room for small study groups. It was very small, designed for only ten people.
He pointed to the textbook.
“Where is the teachers edition?” he asked rather loudly
“I don’t have one.”
“Why not?” in a somewhat argumentative tone.
I didn’t know why not. I had never had a teacher’s edition of any book. No one had ever given me a catalog to order books. I just used what was there.
“ I never ordered one. I don’t even know if they have them for this book.”
He pointed to the story written in Latin.
“ Well, then,how do you know what this says?”
Pause. Really long pause.
“Ummmm…because….. I’m the Latin teacher?”
He knew. I was just making it up as I went along.
Zeus is the best god
Every day I present a person from mythology. Mythology is chock full of rape, incest, adultery, cannibalism, mutilation, betrayal,… you get the idea. After awhile I started to think,
“ How can I teach this stuff to kids? “ and then I would listen to a rap song. Straightened my thinking right out.
Zeus has a lot of women, goddesses, nymphs, mortals, willing or unwilling. He is the MAN,to the hormone filled skins of teenage boys. I assigned presentations on the Greek gods. A big red haired freckled boy got up.
“Zeus is the BEST god.”
He thought for a moment. His catholic upbringing kicked in.
“Except for Jesus.”
The apology
I used to teach French to kindergarten through 4th grade. None of them knew my name, I was just The French Lady. This was my teaching technique:
“You guys won’t remember anything I teach you. ”
“Oh yeah? We will so!”
“Nope, you won’t. I’ll prove it to you. If you remember these four words, you get a point. If you forget them, I get a point.” Then I made the scoreboard.
This generally put them into a feeding frenzy. If any classmate had dared to forget a word they would have lynched him. Every point I got took up the whole board. I made their points tiny dots on the board. If they started to win, I would say,
“You know, I really hate kids.”
“Oh yeah? Then why are you here teaching kids? You don’t hate us. You LOVE us!”
I first heard my dad say this to my daughter when she was four years old, and I was appalled.
“Why should I give you lunch? I don’t even like you.” She didn’t even bother to look up from her book.
” Yes you do Pop Pop. You love me lots and lots.”
So I tried it. The kids don’t believe me either.
One day a first grade class got very rowdy.( I’m sure I had nothing to do with that at all) The teacher was mortified and made every child make me a card with an apology. One card said this:
Thas it. Thas all I’m getting.
Ten years later a student stayed after class to talk to me and mentioned where she had gone to grammar school. It was where I taught ten years ago. And then it hit me. “Did you have really blonde hair and a ponytail?”
It was her. And I still had the card. Which I of course brought to class and told this story to her mortification every chance I got.
THAS ALL FOLKS.
Heard in the Classroom 