In AP English we were supposed to be putting together a C.V. and I was dreading making lists of all my activities and accomplishments. We were including things like a portrait poem and a bunch of work we had done in class. So I had a bunch of pages of stuff to include already. I went home and started digging through my closet and pulled out a bunch of essentially junk mail. Certificates of completion of some civic duty, some certificates of appreciation for volunteer work, letters from honor societies, award letters, etc. Then I turned them all over and printed my work on the back of them. So flipping through this C.V. would not only show what I said about myself, but also authoritatively show what others had said about me too.
I did it because I was lazy and didn’t want to have to paraphrase all that info, but the teacher was stunned. She declared it the most interesting C.V. she’d ever had a student do, and asked if she could keep it as a sample for future classes. I didn’t care, I still had stacks and stacks of letters/certificates like that at home.
Years later I told a co-worker about this when she was making her C.V. for her bachelor’s degree(going back into school at a University which offered life credits) and she used the technique and reported similar astonishment on the part of her prof.
I’m pretty sure it wasn’t. Seventh grade for me was 1979 – 1980. Reagan was a presidential candidate at that time and the poem wasn’t written exclusively about him. I recall the poem still kept the Raven quothing ‘Nevermore’ and was about man’s infringement on the environment and running out large groups of animals.
To be honest, I find that most of the responses so far fail to answer the OP, and instead of giving examples of something trivial that nonetheless impressed a teacher (“my prof in undergrad was impressed that I knew the US has 50 states”), take this as an opportunity to regale us with stories of how they were really brilliant at a very young age (Kindergarten teacher was really surprised I could list all elements in the periodical system, including all known actinides and lanthanides, standing on my head, burping, in alphabetical order, in under 2 minutes). I mean, identifying the link between Gaia and Geo (#34), knowing what the boxer rebellion was (#28) or knowing the mechanism by which leaves turn brown (#5) are hardly trivial feats and I don’t think it’s odd that anyone should be surprised by young kids knowing them.
10th grade English. We had to write an original sonnet for homework. I spent about 15 minutes duly slogging out some bullshit about the unity of humanity with the natural world, in iambic pentameter.
My English teacher thought it was the most awesomestest thing she’d ever read. She called me out in class and said that she had to go check her Shakespearean sonnets to make sure I hadn’t plagiarized.
Yeah. :rolleyes:
One that I AM quite proud of:
I was participating in a Geography Bowl type contest, in which we were in teams, and had to buzz in first in order to answer the question. It could be anything from geographic theory, cultural, or physical geography.
The moderator began reading: “Heavily influenced by Whittlesey’s concept of Sequent Occupance, this author…”
I still have no idea why my brain came up with the answer, but I instantly knew it was correct. I didn’t even let him finish the question. I buzzed in and said, “James Michener”.
Everybody in the room looked at me open-mouthed. I was all .
I guess it wasn’t a teacher, but an important person at work was impressed when he saw how I determined if a bathroom stall was occupied. The stall doors tend to gently swing shut so it’s tough to tell if they’re occupied without doing the glance-in-the-cracks or peer-under-for-shoes routine. I just approached the mirror and looked for the shoes that way.
He made a comment like, “Forget why you came in here?” and I replied, “No, just looking in the mirror for shoes to determine which stalls are free.”
I assume that must have impressed him because he moved me to his “elite” team a few days later.
Back in high school my friends and I were somewhat rebellious–beer, cigarettes, skipping class, that sort of thing. We were not the kind of people our teachers thought were terribly bright or committed to schoolwork.
One day, it was announced that the high school academic quiz team was holding tryouts–it needed four players, and there was an open slot. This team would play on a TV high school quiz show. For a lark, and because I had nothing better to do after school that day, I went to the tryouts. To my great surprise, I did pretty well–no, I couldn’t manage the math questions, and I was a little slow on the science questions; but I was fast and correct on many of the arts, general knowledge, and pop culture questions that left the more-scientifically-minded contenders stumped. In the end, I was offered the open slot on the team, mainly because it needed somebody who knew things like I knew.
When it was announced that I, of all people, had made the team, most of my teachers were shocked. They simply couldn’t fathom how someone who was part of the cigarette-smoking, beer-swilling, class-skipping “loser” group had managed to get on something that was plainly for the school’s super-brains. I kind of enjoyed it.
Interestingly, I recently got curious, so I looked up my old teammates. The three of them had each earned doctorates, had each taught at universities (two still were), and each had published a number of papers. Me–well, I never earned a doctorate or taught at a university, but I think I did pretty well.
Except for the fact that my teacher was a she, and my answer had to do with glucose in th leaves being turned red after the green chlorophyll leached out because of cold weather and less sunlight. But yeah, nearly word-for-word identical teacher response and second kid response… wow.
When I was a high school freshman, they had a school quiz show. A team of freshmen and seniors vs. sophomores and juniors (based on the debatable assumption that you know more the longer you’re in school). I remember answering quite a few of the questions (especially the pop culture ones.* I was figuring it was all pretty close until about 2/3rds of the way when someone recapped the scores for us (we couldn’t see the scoreboard). Not only were we way ahead, but I had probably scored at least half our points. Afterward, I had to go into a room filled with seniors to get my books and got a round of applause.
Three years later, I was going to my college interview with a biology teacher of mine who did alumni interviews. He didn’t remember much of my time in biology (other the fact I was a good student who cut up in class), but the quiz show really impressed him and got me a great recommendation.
*My favorite, “What is Excedrin Headache number 1040?”
In high school, senior year, honors level English (in other words, we were supposed to be smart kids) my teacher was impressed with me because I read 1984 in one night.
I can only assume that she had really low standards for her seniors, maybe under the assumption that we had “senioritis” and wouldn’t read it at all.
Off topic but WOW does this remind me of the time I got screamed at in front of the entire 2nd grade class when we got back our standardized test scores and mine was not at all in line with the reading group I was in. I got in even more trouble when I had to explain to my parents that I could do the work in the higher levels, but I didn’t want to. Catholic school - good times :rolleyes:
maybe 4th grade, I had just read a novel or a story that discussed (and quoted at some length) Longfellow’s “Midnight Ride of Paul Revere”-- a day or after I read 9and enjoyed) this lengthy excerpt, and committed it to memory, my teacher asked, “Class, has anyone ever heard of a poem called ‘The Midnight Ride of Paul Revere?’” (or whatever it’s called–that may not be the actual title). I raised my hand and, with a little prompting, proceeded to recite the first stanza or two from memory.
I got a reputation that day as some kind of weird poetic genius, that stayed with me well through high school, in part because I tried from that day on to live up to my reputation.
Ok, in the realm of “more basic” I had transferred from a private school to a public school during my sophomore year. The physics class I was in at the academy was equated by my guidance counselor(or registrar, not sure) with their class “physical science” because physics was an honors or AP class at public school. Most of the people in the physical science class were juniors or seniors who didn’t make the cut at honors or AP physics, so it was a bit of a blowoff class, but I was still one of the few underclassmen in the room. The first day or so the football coach(I kid you not) was transcribing Newton’s Laws of Motion from his notes onto the blackboard and had his back to the class. I was leaning back in my chair, bored out of my head, and he asked if anyone knew the first law(still without turning around). I started quoting it “An object in motion tends to stay in motion, at a constant velocity…” and he barked, without turning around, “quit reading from the book!”
I replied “I’M NOT” and half the class said “HE’S NOT” at the same time. Coach turned around and his eyes got real wide, as if knowing what is arguably THE most well disseminated bit of physical science in history was a big deal. He was even more impressed when I knew the second and third laws as well.
I think you missed the point with my thing about the Boxer Rebellion. It wasn’t so much odd that the teacher was impressed by it, but that she thought it betrayed some profound historical knowledge on my part when, in fact, I only knew it from some forgettable 16-bit video game. Naturally, I chose not to disabuse of her of any notion she might have had about how brilliant I supposedly was, but I thought it was funny knowing how I really knew about it.
If I wanted to talk about how “brilliant” I was at a young age, I’d tell the board about how I read Homer in 3rd grade or the books I published when I was 11.
8th grade geometry class. The problem was something like this: A cow is tied to the corner of a barn with a 12-foot rope. The barn measures 10 by 15 feet. Find the area of the region the cow can reach.
So basically you are being asked to find the areas of parts of circles. I started drawing the problem: a half circle with a 12-foot radius along the 15-foot side of the barn (with the corner the cow is tied to at the center of the circle), a quarter circle with a 12-foot radius along the 10-foot side, and a quarter circle with a 2-foot radius where the rope wraps around the corner of the 10-foot side.
The teacher watched me do this drawing and was amazed. He said most students just didn’t get the part about the rope wrapping the corner and the change in radius. I think they just left that part off or something.
College computer science course, I forget the topic. Maybe it was programming in Pascal. Anyway, I think it was that we had to sort a set of numbers that represented a deck of cards. The problem statement said the deck would be represented by the numbers 0 to 51 in random order. We started working on it, but nobody’s programs were working right. Finally someone looked at the data, and the professor had given us 1-52 instead of 0-51. I went from the computer lab over to his office to explain the problem, figuring he would see the solution easily. But he just kind of went “Oh, um, . . .” and sat scratching his head, thinking it would be a huge chore to fix the data set. Finally I threw him a bone: “You could change the 52 to a zero, and I think that would do it.”
He was floored. I hope it was only embarrassment that he hadn’t thought of it (1) himself and (2) sooner that made him say something along the lines that I was smarter than he thought I was. (I’d been getting good grades up to that point, so not sure why he would be surprised . . . perhaps because in the mid-1980s I was one of about 2 females in the CS program.)
When I was 9, my family moved to a military base in Europe, which had schools based upon the Ontario K-13(OAC) curriculum (I think). I was coming out of a school board in Québec. My grade 4 teacher was amazed that I had learned to multiply numbers “all the way” to 12x12 in my head, when everyone else had only had to learn up to 10x10.
As it turns out, the Québec curriculum was (and I think still is) considered to be about 6 months ahead of the Ontario one in terms of what material get taught, at least at the primary level.
It made me ahead of the class in Europe, but when I came back to Canada, I was about 6 months behind and was particularly uneducated with regards to fractions, decimals and integers. I caught up, though.
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