teachers--stupidest thing a student ever said/did?

In My Humble Opinion
1

I just read the other thread about the stupid things that teachers have done. Some of those are hilarious (or maybe just sad)!

So now, I ask all of you out there who are teachers: what are some of the doozies that you’ve noticed from students over the years? I’ll start off with one (probably not uncommon):

An 11th-grade student handed in a research paper (which he had the entire semester to work on) directly copied from the internet. Not that dumb, you say? Well, when you consider the fact that he left the web address on there so I’d have no trouble catching him, you’ve got one careless cheater.

OK, that’s probably not the best example, but I’m sure more will come to me. Any other teachers want to share?

2

The first week of first-year Latin, learning basic vocabulary. Teacher writes on the board “puer et puella” - meaning “The boy and the girl” and asked a student to translate. Kid says, in all seriousness, “The boy et the girl.” Class erupts in laughter, teacher sticks a leg out the window in a fruitless effort to escape.

3

My students, little angels that they are, have never said or done anything stupid, at least not in my class.

I am so blessed.

4

IANAT, but dated one once. The best one I recall her mentioning is a student making reference to the “King Arthur Bible”.

One of my fellow English IV (we did a semester on SF books/movies) students in high school once defined the genre of Science Fiction as being “stories that aren’t real.” Every thinks-he-a-comedian male member of this class also claimed to have seen “The Black Hole.” Mr. Woods was a wizened old man of at least 31 years, and it went over his head (I think).

Sir Rhosis

5

IANAT, but my 10th Grade HONORS Social Studies class is composed of the dumbest human beings EVER. Here’s a sampling:

When told that in the 1700s there were 300 million people in India, one girl asked “How’d all those people get there?”

My class (mostly full of Jewish people) didn’t know that there were human rights violations in NAZI GERMANY!

When told that the US helped the white, anti-communists during the Russian Civil War one person said “So we helped ourselves?”

“What’s a leap year?”
“Who’s Benjamin Franklin?”
“Who’s the Vice-president?”
There are literally dozens of others, but I only can store so many.

In my genetics class, we had to do reports using Microsoft PowerPoint. One girl did one on cloning. She said we could use cloning to “bring murder victims back to life so they can identify their killers”!!!

HOW FUCKING STUPID CAN ONE PERSON BE

6

Working in the writing center while I was in graduate school at Emory, I was faced with the task of helping an undergraduate decide on a term paper topic for freshman comp.

I knew I was in trouble when I asked him what things he was interested in, and he replied, “I try not to have any interests – I’m trying to be well-rounded.”

7

Kinda long, but worth it, I hope.

The set up: a group of college students, frosh to seniors, in an introductory natural resources course, have to write a two-page memo about our recent trip to a quarry. This particular quarry is quite near an interstate highway and international airport. It is also one of the few quarries in N.C. that is practically on the fall line. As such, it has been a very profitable operation as it has provided a great deal of the crushed rock used in widening the interstate and improving the airport. In fact, it is so profitable that it is economically efficient to truck rock out past the fall line to projects in the Atlantic Coastal Plain. The quarry manager pointed out these facts as part of the tour.

One of my less gifted students, in describing the operation of this quarry, was very impressed with its proximity to the airport, which made it possible for the rock to be loaded onto planes and transported around the world.

How my sides ached! How the red ink flowed!

8

I give out two different forms of an exam. One student had several answers that would have been correct had he been taking the other exam. This wasn’t so terribly stupid on his part since his grade would probably been about the same either way. But on one test the answer was something like 247,532 while the corresponding question on the other test had an answer like 150. He then tried to convince me that he had just happened to arrive at the answer 247,532. There was no way I could keep from laughing. Thankfully, I controlled it pretty quickly.
A student asks for the pass to the restroom and I allow him to leave. He is gone longer than normal, but is still within what might be a reasonable time (although I am suspecting that he is taking a smoking break). A few minutes later he walks into class eating a cheeseburger. The only place he could have gotten the cheeseburger is at the FFA picnic which is taking place on the other end of the school grounds.

9

We hadn’t discussed asteroid impacts yet, but I mentioned offhand that the dinosaurs were killed by a comet or asteroid 65 million years ago. One student, who’s a smart cookie, but had a momentary lapse, raised her hand and asked, “Were they all standing in the same place?” It’s a great image–all the tyrannasaurus rexes and brontosauruses jostling each other to stay in the asteroid’s shadow as it hurtled toward them . . .

A genuinely stupid one (which I mentioned before in a Pit thread on cheaters), was when a student was confronted with plagiarizing, since his term paper contained, verbatim, large chunks of several web pages. The instructor said, “Look, it’s obvious that you just cut and pasted about two-thirds of your paper!” The student protested indignantly, “I didn’t cut and paste! I typed every word!”

Another one which boggles the mind was a research paper that suggested that NASA should use all those old Saturn V rockets to send people into space for cheap. Mind you, this is supposed to be a research paper. As far as I can tell, the author only did enough reading to find how many people would fit into an Apollo capsule, and made up the rest of the paper out of whole cloth. They didn’t happen to stumble across the fact that the Saturn V rocket was an expendable launch vehicle. The only extant flight-tested Saturn V is rusting, in many pieces, on the lawn at Johnson Space Center.

10

WHen I first moved to Austin in the late 80s, the TExas economy was in terrible shape, and I had to work a host of odd jobs. ONE of those jobs was as at a tutoring service on the University of Texas campus. It paid decently, but it was SCARY how ignorant so many students at a major university could be!

One incident stands out. I got a call from the service asking if I could come down and give two hours of instruction to a girl in a history class. The only information I was given about the subject matter was “Nuremberg and Viet Nam.” Well, even without knowing exactly what was called for, I could infer that (in all probability) the student in question had a left-wing professor who’d assigned her to write a paper exploring whether men like Lieutenant Calley… or perhaps even the higher-ups of the federal government (Robert McNamara, Dean Rusk, General Westmoreland, etc.) should be put on trial for war crimes, as leading Nazis were at Nuremberg. THough I’m not an expert on either WOrld War 2 or Viet Nam, I needed the money, and figured I could fake it, at least for an undergraduate class.

When I met the girl, I was horrified to learn that she was 20 years old, didn’t know who William Calley was, didn’t know who General Westmoreland was, didn’t even know who Lyndon Johnson was (despite the fact that Texas is FILLED with monuments to LBJ!!!), didn’t know where Viet Nam was, and never realized the U.S. had been involved in a war there.

I was so desperate to reach her, I resorted to things like, “Well… have you seen the movie “Platoon”? You have? Good. Well, THAT was the Viet Nam War.”

Anyway, I did the best I could to explain the nature of the Viet Nam war, how American troops sometimes resorted to brutality. I tried to explain how, at Nuremberg, Hitler’s cronies were put on trial for their role in the Holocaust. And when I was finished, she looked at me blankly, and asked, “So, like… Hitler fought in Viet Nam?”

I will NEVER forget that line as long as I live!

11

While teaching in an aviation mechanics school I had a few classes that come Friday test day I noticed that people were sitting in unusual places so i used my two version test. Each row of desks were given different order of questions test. They were multiple guess. after they were done and pulled out not one, but three ‘key’ sheets, the looks on the faces were most … interesting.

12

One morning I found “Jai guru deva” written 100 times on my chalkboard.

13

I’m not a teacher, but my peers do many stupid things. I would like to say them to you, but it gets so annoying that i block them out, and i repress the ones that i did see happen.

I do remember one incident. My chem teacher is telling us about how nuclear radiation mutates things, and how elements change because of radiation. Well, when he was done speaking on that topic, on student asked, “So, like, the uranium is going to turn into a shoe or something?” That class laughed for about 5 minutes straight. We made fun of that student all day.

14

Well, I alway get a chuckle out of answers on exams. I can remember being in hysterics while up late one night grading. My SO thought I was being kind of mean to laugh at students’ answers but, hey, what they don’t know…

My favorite dumb student story is not from one of my classes, but told by my dad who is a professor. He assigned a paper due on a Friday. The papers just had to be in before midnight IIRC, so even after he went home students could slip them under his office door. I guess he did this pretty often and relied on the honor system (that was his dumb thing, IMO, but anyway…). One Saturday he decided he needed to go to the office to catch up and while sitting at his desk grading he noticed a paper sliding under the door. Oops. I wish I could have seen the look on the student’s face when his prof opened the door. Surprise!

Moral of the story: knock first. If the prof’s there you’re busted anyway and at least you won’t look like an idiot trying to get away with something. :smiley:

rivulus

15

Mrs. MikeHardware did her student teaching with a seventh grade social studies class in Tennessee (between Nashville and Knoxville). On one test, after going over this stuff in her daily lessons, she had a question, something like:

What is the mountain range found in eastern Tennessee?
A. Appalachian B.Himalayan C.Andes D.Alps

I helped her grade that test, and she got every answer. She was pretty ticked. The kids don’t live that far from the mountains anyway, and obviously didn’t pay any attention to her lesson.

So, she chewed them out in the next class, told the kids the same question would be on their next test, and went over the information yet again.

And got the same responses on that test as well.

16

I’ve always enjoyed this essay.

17

In a previous life I had a student in an adult education class insist measurements to tenths of an inch simply weren’t possible (he was fine with quarters, sixteenths, etc…) and he was willing to fight to the death over this.

On the flip side, my daughter had a mimeographed math homework sheet with the problem:

Solve for x: 0x = 8

Obviously this was a typo (I assume it should have been 8x = 0). When my daughter pointed this out the next day, the teacher insisted the problem was fine as written. Of course my daughter got the problem wrong. Interestingly, some kids got it right.

18

I’ve been teaching college for over ten years now, so I can’t possibly recall everything, but I will give you what I can remember right now:

–the student who spelled his own name wrong on an essay;

–the male student who seemed surprised that women actually had abortions “back in the early 20th century.” (No clue as to how far back they actually went, but I’d venture to say that women have been having them for quite a few centuries…)

–the student who left me a voice mail message re: her absence from class, telling me that she had to get her hair braided.

–Students every semester who cannot get the title of the short story right when they write it down, never mind the author of said story, even with the information right in front of them.

–students who miss lots of class and don’t turn things in, then want to make up for it on the last day of class and get upset when they find out they’re getting a bad grade.

No, I’m not ranting. Just sharing. :wink:

19

When I was in my last year of undergraduate Engineering school I got a job as a T.A. I graded tests and homework and taught sections. Typically, there would be a couple of friends in the classes that I would T.A., usually people who had been in other classes with me over the years who were taking my class a year late for some reason or another. Jimmy was one such friend of mine. The year before, Jimmy and I were in a class T.A.'ed by Jackie who was a year ahead of us.

Scene: Library. Finals week.

Jimmy: Hey, Haj. I hear that you’re the T.A. for 156 next quarter.
Haj: Yep.
Jimmy: I’ll be in your class.
Haj: Cool.
Jimmy: So what’s your policy on friends in the class?
Haj: Excuse me?
Jimmy: Nothing. Never mind.
Haj: Wait a minute. What do you mean?
Jimmy: Well, like Jackie just gave me an automatic A. That’s just one extreme. What do you do?
Haj: If you study hard, do all of the homework and do well on the tests, you’ll do well in the class.
Jimmy: No problem. That’s cool.

I was flat out disgusted. What an asshole.

That same quarter, Jimmy was a lab partner with a guy named Sean and I. We had collected all of the data and had met to write the report. Jimmy pulled a lab report that another student had written a year ago out of his backpack. He proudly stated that he had stolen it from the professor’s office during office hours. Sean and I told him to just put it away. We’d rather do the work ourselves.

I can only assume that Jimmy is high up in corporate management somewhere today.

Haj

20

I had to explain to a classroom full of befuddled tenth-graders that being tarred and feathered would hurt.