I remember during my high school Calculus final, I was completely stumped by one question. It was an open note test, but I was sure that I must have spaced out during the day we talked about. I ended up throwing 10 different formulas at until I got something that looked reasonable.
I saw my teacher a week later at graduation. Apparently he never taught us how to handle that kind of problem and it was only in there so he could see how we would try and tackle it. He was mad at me because I had gotten it right, which screwed up his curve.
Seventh grade reading class and our regular teacher went out on maternity leave.
We had a long-term substitute filling in who one day assigned us to write a parody of a famous poem.
I came up with a satire of Poe’s “The Raven” which was about four stanzas long, imitated the rhythm and rhyme scheme exactly and had some message about animals becoming extinct.
When the substitute read it, she was genuinely astonished. She had me rewrite it more neatly and said she was going to take it home and keep it which she did.
Months later, the regular reading teacher had returned and the substitute was covering for another one of my teachers. She pulled me aside and told me she still had the poem, showed it to all of her friends and family who were all equally impressed.
I never did have the heart to tell her that I had plagiarized the sucker word for word from one of my Mad magazines.
I had a teacher become surprised that I knew who Hnatyshyn was, too! In my case, though, it’s because he’d come to visit the military base where I was living about a year before and I had met him.
I once had a teacher be really impressed at the long, detailed answer I wrote out to a question in a geography workbook. Lucky for me she didn’t actually read it (she inspected our homework by glancing at it), since it was actually just the lyrics to Pearl Jam’s “Jeremy”.
A teacher once bumped my grade on a paper from a C+ to a B- on the basis of the title alone. It was about one of the seminal works of queer fiction, which I was disappointed to find was unbearably over rated.
The paper was titled, “Clear Cutting the Rubyfruit Jungle.”
This is apropos of nothing, but my when my brother was a kid, he was friends with Ray Hnatyshyn’s son. So the Governor General would sometimes stop by our house to pick his son up. It was kind of impressive while simultaneously very ordinary.
Uh… what impressed my teacher…? Let’s see. I had a 10th grade biology teacher who was impressed as heck that I got to go to the Galapagos Islands with a tour group from the Denver Museum of Natural History. He was pretty excited about my slide show when I returned. And ever after that was a big supporter of my desire to study biology. Hey, I even got a degree in it – which may have been a result of his excitement wearing off on me.
This doesn’t really fit the OP, but what the hell.
When I was in Tech Drawing (I don’t know what that subject is called in other cultures) my teacher, Mr Anderson, for whatever reason, decided to quote a catchphrase from a popular UK sitcom.
He muffed it. He said the words in the wrong order, and his French accent was atrocious. But whatever, he was a 40 year old High School teacher, not a stand up comedian.
We all laughed at his intent, as it was really quite a charming thing for him to do. And then I repeated it, but in a much closer approximation of the real phrasing, as I have always been a pretty good mimic.
I then forgot about it, and life carried on as normal.
A couple of days later, my Mum went to some kind of official gathering, and Mr Anderson’s wife was there too. And they got to chatting, and for whatever reason, she brought up, to my mother, the fact that my more accurate impression had upset Mr Anderson. He felt like he had been upstaged.
So, in my thinking:
It was a weird thing for him to tell his wife about it.
It was a weirder thing for her to then tell my Mother about it.
After hearing about it, I felt kind of guilty over upstaging him, but I was just a 14 year old kid.
The whole chain of: event; to teacher; to wife; to mother; to me again, just amazes me.
Back in 1992, I took a college computer class for Education students. One of the projects we had to do was set up a “stack” in a program called Linkway. This was sort of a precursor to creating web pages. Each stack would contain pages that we designed ourselves. Our instructor wanted us to make a stack that had at least 6 pages and helped to teach a basic lesson. He told our class that if we wanted to be ambitious, the largest stack he had ever received was 10 pages.
I turned in my stack to him.
It was 34 pages.
His jaw hit the floor. He asked if he could keep a copy of it for future demonstration in his class.
I was in some jr. high art class where the teacher was giving us scrap paper to use in our art projects. I guess she’d gotten leftovers from the copy room or something, because they were “fill-in-the-blank” worksheets with history questions on them. She read one of the questions to us randomly to see if anyone knew the answer. It was something like “What was the Chinese rebellion against foreigners that ended in the early 20th century?”
I raised my hand: “It’s the Boxer Rebellion.”
Teacher’s jaw dropped. She asked me how I knew such an obscure question (and I guess those worksheets had come from a higher grade, too). I fancy myself something of a Sinologist now, but back then I knew nothing about China or Asia. In fact, I only knew about the Boxer Rebellion because it was part of the backstory of the character Jetta in the SEGA game Eternal ChampionsEternal Champions - Wikipedia
Maybe not, especially if he felt like you embarrassed him or showed him up (I’m sure that’s not what you intended to do, but you know how people can be…). I’m sure most teachers go home and bitch about their classes to their spouses. I certainly do my fair share of it.
Huh. I guess I thought they would only talk about the official staff related things, rather than what some upstart pupil did in one class on one bland day or other.
Yeah, there’s the official work-related stuff, but nothing ruffles the feathers of a teacher like some young punk trying to get attention (again, not saying you did that) when the instructor is trying to teach, control the class, keep everybody on task, and help the students learn something. And talking about it with other teachers is pretty pointless since they’re all burned out too and only reply with things like, “Yeah, I got some of those types in my class.” That pretty much just leaves the spouse and the bonus is that they have to lay in the same bed next to you all night and listen, whereas others could just go, “Yeah, that sucks. Got something to do, see ya!”
I agree that your incident wasn’t anything for your teacher to get so worked up about, but if it had happened to me I would probably tell my wife about it in passing and then forgive and forget by the next day.
I have two, because I’m a word nerd (classier people might call it a lexophile.)
English class, freshman year. We were doing a unit on Greek and Roman mythology. As a “fun” exercise the teacher was having us come up with words based on the gods. The easy ones got taken quickly -
Then my teacher turned on me. Well, GameHat? Got anything?
“Hmmm…well, “Gaia” must be related to “Geo”, right?”
he blinked twice, grabbed a dictionary. “So it is. Well done. I never bothered to notice that connection before.”
Back in HS French class (senior level)
The teacher was conducting an exercise - think of a french word, then an english word that had the same word root (idea being a lot of English has French roots).
The class threw out a bunch. Once things had slowed down, the teacher (and she was a real tough customer. Tiny lady, nevertheless had us all afraid of her. She wasn’t mean, just brutally demanding.)
“GameHat?”
“La guerre. Guerrilla.”
She gave me a rare smile. “Nobody came up with that one in my earlier classes.”
I did feel a little guilty about that one because it’s more a spanish word. But the root is the same nonetheless. And english speakers do use it.
In fourth grade we had a weekly spelling quiz. For extra credit, we were to write a sentence using as many words from the list as we could work into it.
One week’s list had a nautical theme, and two of the words were “bayou” and “capsize”. Being the cutup that I was, I wrote:
“I’ll bayou a hat if you tell me your capsize.”
The teacher gave me the extra credit, with a hand-drawn smiley face no less. She liked it so much she called me out to read it for the class.
Years later I was the first (and for another decade or so, only) National Merit Scholar to graduate from my high school. About five years after graduation I went back to a Friday night football game at that school, and ran into two of my former teachers at the ticket stand. We reminisced a bit, exchanged pleasantries, and then as I was leaving one of them called out to me, “Thanks for saving our jobs!”
Back in first grade, I completed 20 two-digit multiplication problems in less than five minutes. (It was a private school where you learned at your own pace.) When the teacher graded it and realized I got them all right, she was very astounded, showing it to all the other teachers. I went on to complete the entire math program there, which stopped at doing square roots of six-digit numbers, if I remember correctly.
I was really bored when I moved back to public school. Until I got introduced to algebra and got to use a calculator, and realized all my arithmetic was pointless since the calculator could still do it faster than me.
My Spanish teacher was getting ready to lay some of the wisdom of Winnie the Pooh on us, and asked if anyone knew who had written the books. She was amazed when I answered immediately, “A. A. Milne”. She said in all her years of teaching, no one had ever known. I wonder now exactly how many years of teaching that was.
I took a math class in which I did not lift a finger. One day I served a detention for that math teacher and he gave us a bunch of word problems such as:
Ground
Feet
Feet
Feet
Feet
Feet
Feet
The answer being, “six feet under ground”. I got most of them right in a snap. The teacher told me he was surprised…he had always thought I was none too bright.
An algebra teacher once read me the riot act after I got a bunch of Trivial Pursuit questions right. The one that set him off was my knowing that Sirius was the Dog Star. He was mad at me for flunking in his class, although I was clearly smart enough to pass.
Heh, I once did a parody of “The Raven” too. In my case, my parody was titled “The Raisin”, featuring a California Raisin-type antagonist. I do remember a MAD parody called “The Reagan”, and it did inspire me to do the parody, but my writing was all original. Was it “The Reagan” that you copied?
I think it was 5th grade English when I noticed early in the year that every time I used the word “decided” my teacher wrote “good!” next to it and gave extra credit. I have no idea where her fascination came from. All I had to do for an easy A was to write a load of crap and then go back and insert “decided” all over the place.