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

In My Humble Opinion
41

I’ve been a TA at a couple of grad schools, and a Visiting Professor. College Students take the cake.
– One of them handed in a lab report where he talked about “excelleration” of a particle. I wrote “Accelent!” underneath in red.

– One student handed in a lab report that spiraled around his paper, going around from the periphery inward toward the center.

– Several students have handed in problem sets where the writing jumps all over the page, forming little “child windows” around the paper, with no indication about the order. The answer is never identified by being bolded, or underlined, or in a box. These students invariably can’t understand why they have points deducted.

– Nobody, apparently, has staplers or paper clips. Multiple-page problem sets and reports are handed in folded, or with the corners torn to hold the pieces toigether.

42

I’m enjoying these, as is my husband.

Ok, here’s my own story, one of the classics from a long career of elementary school teaching.

This story is not dumb, but it’s still very entertaining.

Fourth Grade Class

Scene: The middle of our “Sex-Ed” unit, called “The Human Body” where we discuss all the systems in the body, and introduce the “Reproductive System”, though actual reproduction is not discussed until the children are in 5th grade.

I had a box, which became famous at our school. It was the “Miss A’s Question Box” and was merely a tissue box, that I’d covered in black paper and drawn silver question marks on. It was pulled out every spring and the students put their questions in the box, and I’d answer them at our weekly class meeting. I’d answer the questions as honestly as possible, without telling the students TMI which would get me in deep doo doo with the parents.

In some cases, I just didn’t answer the question, and hinted at what it was, and said that the question would be better answered by the askers parents.

Some of the questions. Oh, forgot to say that these were anonymous, but after a whole semester, I knew all the kids handwriting anyway. They just didn’t know how clever I actually was.

I’ve corrected the spelling, btw. Vagina almost always got misspelled as “vaJina.”

*Dear Miss A,

I know that girls grow hair on their vaginas when they have a puberty. Do boys also grow hair on their penises? Does the hair grow out all the way to the tip?*

I loved the visual that I got when I imagined what this girl thought a male penis looked like. I’m sure her parents would’ve loved it if I’d said the hair did grow to the end, and that if she touched it, her hands would be permanently stained purple.
*Dear Miss A,

Does it hurt a boy to be erected? (LOL) Why do boys want to sex with girls if it hurts so much?*

Ahhh…so many ways to answer this question. This was one that I left for Mommy and Daddy to answer!

Last one…

*Dear Miss A,

Why do boys like girls breasts so much? All they are is lumps of fat, anyway. *

This was a toughie. I explained what secondary sexual characteristics were, and left it that.

What I wanted to say is this: “Because boys are dumb-dumbs.”

I hated doing the parent orientation for that unit more than any other task in the whole year. I often kept the anonymous notes from the previous year, so I could demonstrate to parents that, yes, in fact, their children were that advanced and mature.

Sorry for blathering.

43

Well the one I remember from my student teaching days was when I was teaching a pretty low-level class how to figure gas mileage. One student claimed his dad had an easier way to do it. He’d drive the car until it ran out of cas, and then put one gallon in it. Then drive it again until it ran out of gas and see how far it went. It’s was pretty tough not to start laughing.
My better students pulled this one, though. I asked them why they never did the odd-numbered homework problems.
Them: “Because the answers to those are in the back.”
Me: “Well isn’t that a good reason to do them? So you can check your work?”
Them: “But the answers are there. Why do I need to do it if the answer is there?”
Me: “So you can make sure you know how to find the answer?”
Them (genuinely baffled): “But the answer is there!”

We went round and round with this. Finally another spoke up:

Him: Well, also because they never ask for the odd numbered ones on the homework quizzes.
Me: Well, speaking AS “they”, I think I can do something about that.

Next day, I gave them a homework quiz with, sure enough, odd-numbered problems on it. None of them saw it coming. They protested that this was supremely unfair.

44

:::hanging my head in shame:::
Sadly, that girl could have been me. But I blame my woefully inadequate public school education. (But I DO know who LBJ was, where VN is, and that Hitler wasn’t involved in VN!)

In my junior high and high school years, we did “units” on the Revolutionary War, the War of 1812, and the Civil War several times, each. There were times when I was thinking, “Why are we doing the Civil War again? We did this last year.”

I NEVER, EVER learned anything about WW 1 in school. Never. Not a damn thing. Ditto for the 20s, 30s, the crash of '29, the Depression, the Korean War and Viet Nam. Nothing. Everything I know about the Korean War comes from watching MAS*H reruns. And I’m not trying to be funny.

We did go over Pearl Harbor, (but only glossed over events leading up to it; as far as I knew, not much happened in Europe before December 7th :rolleyes: )
We read The Diary of Anne Frank to discuss the atrocities of the Holocaust, but that was about it. :frowning:

45

There was a terrible car wreck, involving two students from the high school where I taught English. One was killed, the other paralyzed from the chest down.

A month or so later, one of my seniors turns in his creative writing portfolio, which has a poem he has written as an homage to the student who died. It was the best thing he’d ever written: sensitive, a bit of a cliche, but with some truly touching imagery and a lovely rhythm. It is so good, I ask him to read it to the class, and he does, explaining that he has “written this for Molly.” [sub]Not her real name[/sub]

A few days later, I hear from the school librarian (with whom I had shared the piece in celebration) who has found this poem on the internet. My student had simply changed the name of the girl, and presented the entire poem as his own.

The stupidity of this act was truly awesome.

There is a strict policy in place about academic dishonesty, and as a result of this blatant plagiarism, his entire portfolio received a zero. This pulled his average for the semester below passing, which put his eligibility for graduation in serious doubt.

He basically desecrated the memory of a girl who was very well-liked, and whose death shook the entire school community deeply. He repeated his lie on several occasions, and was even going to let me investigate getting his piece published.

He actually had the gall to try and argue that he didn’t really do anything wrong.

I know this thread is meant to be funny, but this act really hurt, and has stayed with me. It makes me question my integrity as a teacher that a student of mine would do such a thing.

46

I had a wonderful student called Mark who was desperately keen, and reletively bright, but had a tendency to open his mouth before he switched on his brain…

Me: “And that is how the Electric Motor works… (or some such)”
Mark: “Aaahh!! I think I understand now…”
Me: “Good Mark - I am glad that you understand.”
Mark: “Understand what?”
Me: ROFL - literally!!

Mark (running up to me in the corridor): “Mr Pixie; Mr Pixie”
Me: “Yes Mark?”
Mark (brain cogs whirring in neutral): “Uuuuuummm… Hi!”

I wonder where he is now??

Gp

47

Yondan, just a word of support for strict academic integrity policies and teachers and administrators who have the courage to enforce them.

It’s apalling to me that students come to us in college who think that it’s perfectly acceptible to lift passages from another person’s work without using quotation marks or citing the source, or who think that turning in a paper downloaded from the interent is no big deal. The former can sometimes be attributed to ignorance, but more often both the former and the latter convey the student’s utter disrespect for his instructor, fellow students, and institution of learning.

How can students learn that plagiarism is wrong if they are not taught about it? And even if they are incapable of grasping its moral dimension, how will the learn that it will not be tolerated if, when it rears its ugly head, the rules are not enforced?

My preferred method of enforcement involves a guillotine, an all-school assembly, and a row of heads on pikes in the cafeteria, that all the students might learn from the transgressions of the few . . . but my pedagogical methods have sometimes been described as excessive.

[I’m having trouble submitting, so apologies if this doubles .]

48

When I was doing my student teaching with 9th grade English students I ran into this problem. Frustrated, I cut short (one and two sentence) passages out of Enclyclopia Briannica, put them on an overhead, and we worked on paraphrasing them as a class. Two things were shocking–1) how much reouble they had with it and 2) the fact that no teacher had ever done this with them before: they’d heard lectures about paraphrasing, but never seen it done, or if they had seen it done it was out of canned worksheets, not actual encyclopedias (which are legitimate research sources at that level)

I think that lesson was one of hte most useful things I did.

As far as stupid things: Nothing really beats the girl who couldn’t understand the difference between possessives and plurals. It was truly a matter of not getting that they were different classes of words. I finally had to give up, as we were holding the class back and she was not willing to work with me one-on-pne.

There was also the girl who wrote in a thank you letter to 9/11 rescue workers: “I hope that your faith in god has helped you through all this and if you are not a believer I hope this experience will lead you to Him.”

I didn’t send it.

49

There is a student whose been in a class of mine for the past two semesters (BTW I’m a student too, not a teacher). We have nicknamed him “Hoover” because none of my friends knew his name anyways, and he was such a suckup to the prof - only he did it badly.

He once tried to argue something or other with the prof, claiming that there was no way the answer to a question was right (this had something to do with Shroedinger and the PArticle in a Box, but I don’t remember the exact question). The prof finally shut him up by asking him who, out ot the two of them, had a PhD. in Quantum Chemistry?

Ok, thats not such a bad example, but the next one:

Using UV spectroscopy, given the wavelength, we had to determine the length of the theoretical box for an object. So we use the equation relating energy to wavelength and the speed of light first, then solve. Well, Hoover pipes up and says:

“I don’t understand. So we have to accelerate the sample to the speed of light?”

I don’t think the prof has ever turned that shade of purple before or since! Needless to say, the whole class was cracking up. BTW, Hoover is a second-year chemistry major…!

50

Well, I am not a teacher, but since February, I have been an English tutor at the Learning Enhancement Center here at school. I get all kinds of students from Non-Native Speakers who need help with reading comprehension to students who need me to proof-read their papers.

The students who need their papers read are usually junior or seniors, some of them are non-traditional undergrads, and all of them are older than me and have had more years in school.
The first thing I ask anybody who is having trouble, “Do you know what a thesis statement is?”
“Uh…no…not really.”
“Ok, do you know how to write an introduction paragraph?”
“No, I really don’t.”
“Ok, do you know what a five-point essay is?”
“I think so…”
“Have you ever made an outline?”
“Oh, no, I don’t need to.”

IOW, it’s not enough for me to simply proofread their paper, I must teach them how to write a paper. How do they go nearly 16 years without learning how to write a paper? That’s not even the worse part. Many of them don’t know how to properly construct sentences! I cannot believe I’m in college, tutoring other college students on how to properly contstruct a sentence using a subject, verb, and adjective.
:rolleyes:
[sub] I am aware that I probably made mistakes in this post, please excuse me. [/sub]

51

IANAT but I recall a chem class, [sub] back when we only had about 20 elements [/sub]…

Teacher didn’t give “bonus” questions, but would throw in a gift q every so often. IIRC the question was similar to:

"Heteropoly anions are held together by:

a) Co-ordinate covalent bonds
b) marital bonds
c) municipal bonds
d) James bonds

I sat between a couple of real rocket scientists. For about 30 seconds I heard Juan mumbling “municpal bonds, municpal bonds, what are they, I don’t remember them, OH!!!..”

We discussed this when he got his test back, and John stepped up and said, “Wasn’t there a scientist named James?”

…is the bonding radius 007, fool?

52

I’ve posted this story to the boards before, but it was over a year ago, so I hope you’ll forgive me for telling it again.

One of my students was supposed to be writing a research paper comparing several ways of treating or preventing a particular disease. Well, she decided to cut and paste a few pages about iron deficiency anemia from the online Merck Manual – a silly choice anyway, since the passage was readily identifiable and not even remotely on topic. Now, the Merck Manual refers to iron by its chemical symbol, Fe. The student evidently decided this was too technical, so she used her word processor’s search-and-replace function to change every instance of “fe” to “iron.”

She handed in a paper full of words like “deironctive” and “irontus” and wondered why I got suspicious :rolleyes:

I also had a young man who lifted chunks of text from an essay I had assigned without any attempt to paraphrase or use quotation marks. It didn’t seem to have occurred to him that I’d probably read the original.

53

I would have been that clueless 20-year old too. At 20, my entire education on Viet Nam was what I had figured out from old Doonesbury comic books. That and things like elephant grass and punji sticks (sp?). We just never got there in school.

IANAT, but my mom was teaching for a while, and my favorite story was the kid who turned in an essay that was not only plagiarized, but plagiarized from Dave Barry. Yes, the single most well-known humor writer in the US. He had printed it out and then whited out the title and written in his own.

54

Thanks for the support, Podkayne. It is greatly appreciated.

55

I’m just a grader, not a teacher. I grade for classes in the CS dept. Aside from the fact that none of the kids can write a simple sentence to save their lives, it’s not too bad. Granted, most of the proofs I see are along the lines of “If A, then A; therefore, A”, but I got used to that.

One guy took the cake, though. On his test, he asserted that the sum of the reciprocals of the first n integers is equal to the reciprocal of the sum of the first n integers. I was flabbergasted–apparently this person believes that 1/2 + 1/2 = 1/4. What was he thinking?

56

Okay, with regard to my earlier post…this can’t be blamed directly on the students. Some blame lies with their previous (high school?) teachers for not teaching them how to write a paper.
I did learn how to outline and write a paper in high school (this was back in the dark ages when we had to actually TYPE a paper on a typewriter! No Spellcheck! No WP progams! :eek: )

Another example of my public school failings: My first day of classes at college. I kept hearing this word. I knew it was an important word, because of the context in which it was used, but I’d never heard it before. Yes, I know there are no stupid questions, and I should have asked what the word meant, but everyone else seemed to know what it meant, and it was my first day in COLLEGE, after all, and I was a little intimidated.
Luckily, I only had three classes before a break, so I quickly ran back to my dorm and grabbed my little dictionary to look it up. Hmm, how can I look it up if I can’t spell it? S-I-L? Nope, that’s not it. S-Y-L? Oh, okay, there it is, Syllabus, noun, An outline or a summary of the main points of a text, lecture, or course of study.
Well, that makes sense.
And yes, I somehow made it through high school, and made into college without ever hearing the word syllabus. My high school teachers didn’t use the word.

57

I’m not a teacher, but I have witnessed some incredible acts of stupidity among fellow students. . .

Setting: High school, AP Biology
Scenario: A group of students has found the answer key to the final exam and distributed the answers to anyone who wanted them right before the test. I declined the cheat sheet, but I did see the first few answers, which kind of stuck in my head. I realized as I answered the first few questions that the cheat sheet was obviously wrong, thus solving my moral dilemma about what to do about the cheaters. In fact, the fake cheat sheet had been carefully constructed so that using it would get you a score of 0% on the test. This was a multiple choice test, so even random guessing would have gotten you somwhere around 25%. Most of the cheaters were so confident that they didn’t even bother to double check any of the questions. One fellow told me later that he knew that he shouldn’t have a perfect score, so he intentionally changed some answers from what was on the cheat sheet (thus giving the correct answer, without knowing it!). He received a 2%, I think.

Setting: University, Calculus 3
Scenario: There was a student we called ‘Fuzzyhead’ because of his mane of curly hair that he seemingly had no interest in grooming. The irritating thing about Fuzzyhead was that he was such an obvious slacker/idiot, yet he seemed to always do well in his courses. One day, from the back of the room, he wakes up long enough to ask the prof a question on a topic we had just covered. The professor starts a lengthy explanation, only to see that Fuzzyhead has already gone back to sleep!

Setting: University (Graduate school), Advanced Mechanics of Materials
Scenario: Professor is reviewing the stress conditions in a loaded beam (like a simple bridge). A student asks a rather simple question, which the professor answers quickly. The student persists in asking ridiculously obvious questions and then arguing with the professor about the answers. The professor maintains a good attitude and simply says that the class really needs to move on to the next subject, and offers to to review the material 1-on-1 with the student after class. The student refuses to let it drop and continues arguing. Then the following exchange takes place:
Prof: ‘Have you read the text? Have you done the homework?’
Angry student: ‘Yes, of course!’
Prof: ‘I don’t think you have, or you would already know these answers.’
Angry student: ‘I certainly did do the homework! Maybe you just aren’t explaining it well!’
Prof: ‘I see. Well, I still don’t think you’ve done the work. But I would be very happy if you would prove me wrong on the test next week.’
Angry student (nearly yelling): ‘Well, I did the work. . .’
Prof: ‘Fine then. So you will prove me wrong, and I would like that.’
Angry student (yelling): ‘I will NOT!’

58

A month or so ago, we were playing “Idiom Pictionary”. The kids draw an idiom out of a cup, and they have to draw it…blah blah blah. One girl was drawing, “Have a ball.” She managed to get the kids to say “a ball”, but they couldn’t guess the first word. One of my Asian girls flat out says with a straight face, "Lick a ball??

I laughed so hard I thought I was going to piss my pants. The kids were so grossed out that I laughed even harder.

59

Thirty years ago, back when I was in high school, my junior year English teacher assigned us poems to do research on. The research was done by two person teams.

My partner was a jock football player and let me do all the work, which I preferred anyway, as I wanted it done, to my mind, correctly. Our poem was Browning’s “My Last Duchess”. I discovered that the duchess of the title was none other than Lucrezia Borgia. I even found an actual picture of her, a detail in a larger work in which her father, by then Pope Alexander VI, was the main feature.

We had to do a class presentation of our work. I will never forget the student who raised their hand and asked “If he was Pope, how could he have children?” my reply was the only good comeback I have ever made “Well, just like any other man I guess.” The poor soul’s face got read as I explained he had only been Rodrigo Cardinal Borgia when Lucrezia and her two brothers had been fathered.

60

8th grade history:

A girl, let’s call her “Tawny” asks our teacher, Mr. Duquette “Who won the Civil War again?” As if the “again” mitigated her idiocy. Mr. Duquette handled it with a great deal of composure, saying, “I think I know who asked that, but I won’t justify it with a response” [his back was turned to the class as he was writing on the blackboard].

Tawny is going to Tufts next year.