I should clarify. She speaks perfect English. Her being Asian is irrelevant. All apologies.
“Why am I failing your class?”
– the student who came to about 1/4 of the class meetings and turned in zero work.
I get one of these every quarter in Freshman Comp.
We had some classic chemistry lessons. Whenever we had a test, the teacher would prepare two question papers which looked very similar, only there were slight differences in the values and data given. Many people, of course, didn’t notice, and were no little surprised when they revieced rather low marks compared to the person next to them.
There was one person in the set who was renowned for asking rather strange questions. One lesson, after talking about melting and freezing points for a while, he asked “Sir, is it just a coincindence that water boils at 100°C and freezes at 0°?”.
His best was given about a week before we left for the exams, when we were just rounding off everything.
“Sir, one thing I never quite understood : are ions actually made of iron?”
The teachers response : “You’ve just sent me to the center of the earth and back”
My wife is a university professor, as are many of our friends. Some of the stuff college students pull is just amazing. So many of them have zero sense of foresight and tact. Yesterday, for example, my wife went into campus to meet with a student for a conference the student had scheduled with her. She usually doesn’t have to go in on Tuesdays, but made the trip for this student. The student didn’t show. Last night the student emails, saying, “Oh, I couldn’t make it. You won’t believe how busy I am.”
Screw you, kid. You think your professors sit around drinking mint julips and watching TV all day? They wouldn’t believe how busy you are?
So many of them seem to believe they’re the center of the universe. They have no concept of doing anything on their own. My friends have had students call them at 9pm to ask what a word they encountered in the reading meant. This semester, 8 weeks into a 15 week class, one kid emailed my wife saying, “I know I have never set foot in your classroom this semester but I need this class to graduate. Can I get a C?” No, you moron, you can’t. And I can’t believe you had the nerve to ask. You’ve done no work, no reading, no assignments, you can’t even be bothered to wander in and put your ass in a chair and you want a C?
Currently there are two students who, last semester, whined for incompletes and were granted them. With 4 weeks to go in the semester, neither has contacted my wife about finishing that work.
I know college is a big transition from high school - you don’t get nearly the amount of hand-holding that you do in high school. But you’re the one who is supposed to be grown up, you’re the one bitching about wanting stuff that’s useful “in the real world.” Do you think that in the real world you can tell your boss, “Sorry I stood you up for that meeting, boss, you just won’t believe how busy I am!” Try it and I guarantee you’ll be less busy pretty quickly.
So many college students need an intro course called “You Are Not the Most Important Person In The World.”
Heh. My high school World History teacher had a tradition that if anybody said something really dumb/funny, they got to write it on the classroom ceiling in Sharpie. It was great.
My favorite was when one brain donor raised her hand and asked, “So Caligula thought he was the planet Jupiter?” - Not because of the quote itself, really, but because the student teacher who was sitting in immediately got up and started running in circles around the main teacher saying, “Look at me! I’m revolving around the sun!”
Sigh … That is so true. I wasn’t going to tell this story because it’s long, not particularly funny, and more suitable for the Pit, but what the heck…
I teach a Writing Across the Disciplines course with a unit on the social sciences. For the final project, the students have to do some sort of field work on campus and prepare a report about what they did and observed. One of the options (not the only one) involved observing a discussion class.
One of my students – I’ll just call him J – e-mailed a poli sci professor out of the blue and asked to observe his class, specifying a class time that was actually the prof’s office hours. The prof, naturally, wrote back to say he didn’t have a class at that time; J and the professor exchanged several more e-mails over the next few days; eventually it came out that the class was in fact a lecture and therefore not suitable for J’s project. J sent the prof a sarcastic e-mail to the effect of “Why didn’t you tell me it was a lecture class in the first place? Thank you for being so helpful. Thank you for wasting my time.”
At this point, the prof forwarded the entire exchange to me. I called J in for a conference and attempted to explain why his last message was inappropriate under any circumstances and particularly offensive when the professor hadn’t been obligated to help him in the first place. He didn’t seem to get it. I told him to write a letter of apology and turn in a signed copy with his final project – no letter, no credit.
“Uh, you mean I should write an e-mail apologizing and get the professor to sign it?”
“NO!!! I mean you should type up a letter, sign it yourself, and turn it in, and then I’ll pass it on to Professor L.”
Inevitably, attached to his final project was a copy of an e-mail he’d already sent to the professor, in which he tried to excuse himself and referred to the whole incident as a “misunderstanding.”
I finally did manage to get a typed and suitably humble letter out of him. It was all of four lines long, but by that point I was too exhausted to press the point any further.
:: grumble :: Who the hell is raising these kids today? I swear, it’s turning me into an old lady before my time…
Leaving aside ignorance and stupidity (eg. inability to add fractions at 17) my favorites are:
IT class. Text book has list of examples of digital and analogue things. Starts with Digital: old fasioned watch with hands and Analogue: digital watch. I had great difficulty persuading people that this was a misprint, even with arguments like “WHY DO YOU THINK IT’S CALLED AN ANANOLOGUE WATCH??” I didn’t think it was the time to bring up the fact that many handed clocks seem to jump in 20 sec bursts.
Chemistry class. Student asks “If the core of the earth is so heavy, why doesn’t it sink to the bottom?”
IANATeacher, but I have heard some ridiculous things from my peers. I had a great high school history teacher who would spend two days every year showing his classes a slide show of his time in the Viet Nam war. He was a technician and didn’t see much bloodshed so it was mostly pics of him and his buddies goofing off. He described to the class that one of his jobs was to maintain a giant microwave dish used to beam information between S.E. Asia and Washington before satellites were widely used. The girl in my class who was on a never ending quest for split-ends in her hair raised her hand and earnestly asked, “So do you like, talk into it?” With a straight face, I replied (I had a good relationship with this teacher and he usually let me handle the comebacks) “Yes, the dish shape is designed to magnify a human voice many thousand times.” She was satisfied with that answer.
P.S. Not a stupid student trick, but also funny. During the war that same teacher used to sneak into other people’s barracks (or whatever they’re called) and break radio equipment in a way he could easily fix. When his victims came to him (he was the repair guy) he would say he was swamped and couldn’t get to it for a few weeks, then they would bribe him with steaks and antitank rockets and he would sit around for a few hours reading comics books before spending two seconds undoing whatever he did. He was a hilarious teacher.
In year 10, I learnt from the guy I sat next to, that photosynthesis was when plants turned into animals.
As an English teacher, I always think back to the Indonesian student I had when I was working in London. Appropriately enough, his name was Bright. He was indeed bright by nature. In fact, even though the class was intermediate-advanced, I still thought he had no business being there. So, I guess he got bored and used to try and trick us with questions of style or definition. There was a new one each day for each teacher. For example, we’d just pre-read a text about volcanoes or some such and I asked if there were any questions. Bright (fucking Bright again!) asks, “Why is the mountain 1000 feet high, but at the top, there is a 50 foot drop into the lava?”
Absolutely no interest in the answer of course. The little prick just liked to see us squirm.
IANAT, but this happened in my Spanish 101 class, freshman year of college in Georgia. We were instructed to say where we were from in Spanish and when I named Maryland as my state of origin, one of the other students said “But that’s not a state! What STATE are you from?” I was fairly dumbfounded.
On a college visit my senior year, the student showing me around campus asked me if Maryland was anywhere near Baltimore (we were in Pennsylvania that time, so no excuse for not being near the state in question).
booklover : sounds a little like a conversation I had in chat once (not at #sd). Someone asked me where I was from, and I answered Quebec. They asked what state that was in. Just because of their stupidity, I answered North Dakota. They asked if I knew “Jim”?
Another time I was complaining about a concert in Montreal being cancelled, and the only place in Canada that the band was going to was Vancouver. Someone told me to get off my lazy ass and drive!
Not student stories, but prety dumb kids anyways 
Haha that reminds me of a good one.
Language class. We’re beginning students in this language, and the teacher is speaking to us in the language instead of in English. However, what he’s saying is exceedingly easy to understand. There are ten of us in class. He turns to the first of us and asks “Where are you from?” in the foreign language. He prefaces this with telling us where HE is from, so we know exactly how to say it and most probably what he is asking. The first person answers "I am from (in the foreign language, and then) New York (in English). The next eight people are asked the same question, each one in turn answers “I am from Maryland,” “I am from California,” etc. When the last guy’s turn comes around the teacher asks him “where are you from?” The student looks at him, screws up his face, and says, “I know you’re asking some kind of question…”
I’m a student, not a teacher, but I’ve encountered some stupid students in my classes.
Someone in my high school freshman Algebra 2 Honors (!) class asked the teacher, “Is there such a thing as a parallelogram?” That was four years ago, and I still remember the look on the teacher’s face after hearing that one
Currently I’m working as a grader for a beginning computer science course (UNIX and C) at my college. I recently graded one program that would read several lists of numbers and accumulate sums of the lists. It came with a note from the student that said something like, “Everything works fine, except it keeps adding 48 to all the output numbers for some reason.” I tested the program and that was indeed what it did. I took a look at the code and started giggling when I realized that his array definition looked like this:
int nums[10] = {‘0’};
For those of you who don’t know C, ‘0’ means the character 0, not the integer 0. The ASCII code for ‘0’ is 48.
-Andrew L
I regularly get students who think 1/a + 1/b = 1/(a+b) . I’m talking physics and engineering majors.
In high school we had to analyse poems by Edwin Arlington Robinson in groups. I was eagerly awaiting the report on one of my favorites (I wasn’t in the group assigned to that poem), about a woman who thinks her child is so special and doesn’t understand why no one else sees it (I don’t recall the name of the poem). The reporting group began with “Well, we think this poem is about Jesus…” I burst out laughing (OK, I was a snot-nosed punk at the time, but still…)
Does nobody know how to sanity check any more? For Pete’s sake, that’s just so easy to check and disprove. Oh well…I can rant about the poor mathematical skills of many people. Sometimes I think that all engineering students (or at least all CS students) should be required to take a class in real analysis. There’d be a sharp drop in the number of engineers produced, but the quality would probably rise. I know this is impractical, but I can dream it, can’t I?
Well, what is it then, FriendRob? 1/a+b? Did I get it right?
Thank god I’m an English major.
Anyway, this past semester I did some work at the student writing center for extra cash. As PPG said, I had many, many students who were sophomores or even juniors who did not know how to structure an essay. So I taught them these things I learned in ninth grade: how to write a thesis, the inverted triangle introduction paragraph, how to structure paragraphs, topic sentences, conclusions. I actually spent a few hours writing down everything I knew about it, diagrams and all, plus some basic writing rules (when to use a comma, for example) and photocopied it. I made a sample outline with spaces for the students to fill in with their actual information. (It’s actually very helpful if anyone wants me to e-mail it to them.) I handed out copies to way too many students that semester. It was truly frightening. It made me realize that I have been considered smart for so many years only because I know how to convey my thoughts in an organized manner.
I also agree with Legomancer: You Are Not The Center Of The Universe would be a great class for some of the folks I know.
Oh, I feel dumb. I know you’re all happy to hear that I’m not planning a career in Engineering.
1/ab? Is that right? (I haven’t taken a math class in six years.)
(a + b)/ab. Not the sort of thing worth remembering if you don’t use it.
You see 1/a + 1/b = 1/(a+b) about as often as you see (a + b)[sup]2[/sup] = a[sup]2[/sup] + b[sup]2[/sup]. Even after they are supposed to have mastered the binomial theorem.
** Nacho4Sara **, if you could email me the work you’ve done I would seriously be in your debt forever. That would be completely invaluable. (I sure hope that word means what I think it means, it’s midnight here, and I just finished a crying jag…I’m not thinking clearly.)
But please, please send it! Here, I’ll even provide me email right here so you don’t have to look up my profile.
pepperlandgirl4@yahoo.com