My roommate is a teacher, so this is second-hand.
She has her 7th grade science class doing science projects this semester, the standard “do a simple experiment and make a presentation on it” kind of thing. She had one student come in on a Wednesday, asking some questions on how he should set up his experiment. Then he came in on Friday, that’s two days later, with a graph of the results of 14 days worth of experimental data.
Oddly enough, not too long ago my wife’s grandmother was talking about a rumor in her schoolgirl days that coke and asprin would get you high.
…It really IS the wonder drug…
IANAT, but I am a student, and my AP European History class last year was great for laughs.
“If the trench warfare lasted for years, when did they sleep?”
And then there was a whole group of students who absolutely insisted that Bismark is a country.
IANAT, but I am a TA. And man what a sad, sad quarter it’s been.
I can’t believe the cheating. One student copied verbatim from a website who’s link she included in her bibliography. Even if she hadn’t, did she think I wouldn’t notice her charts were formatted in HTML? That her writing was magically improved from previous efforts? Did she think I couldn’t google her text? ugh. And the worst part is that my prof was reluctant to send her to Judicial Affairs because he doesn’t like the idea that she might get kicked out of school.
Then there were the ridiculous test answers. My favorite this year was to the question:
“Define grafting and explain why it is used.”
Answer:
“Grafting is sticking too [sic] plants together like glue. It changes the sexual orientation of the plant.”
It took about 15 minutes of hysterical laughing before I could calm down.
Their writing skills were piss poor as well, and on my first day of office hours, I even had a girl who used “more better” while talking to me. :eek: My horrified brain couldn’t process that for a second, because I’d only seen it written, and then in only in examples of the “this is how not to do it” kind.
Was she Indian, by any chance? I’ve heard this particular construction from several Indian immigrants, and I wonder if that might be closer to the way their language actually works.
Both versions were common knowledge around my high school. Class of '82.
Nope. I’m not sure what her ancestry was, but her accent told me she’d been living in California a very long time, likely since birth. It wouldn’t have hurt my brain so much if she were obviously an immigrant, because I’m so used to being around immigrants that I even start speaking in fractured English without realizing it during long conversations with one (or lapsing into their language if I know it). I’d lose a lot of friends if I were anal retentive about people who are learning the language.
Also keep in mind that these are freshmen in college I’m talking about. Christ. And even after I sent them an exhaustive reference on how to cite their sources and format their bibliographies and warned them that there would be no excuse for doing something so simple incorrectly, most of them still couldn’t get it right.
My bride taught in a self contained behavior classroom for 5/6th grade. It is a classroom for kids with emotional/behavior problems. Around the end of March one kid, who had been in the classroom for the entire school year, figured out that his parents had lied to him and this was not a class for gifted children. The fact that it took him 6 months to figure it out indicated that he was not a T.A.G. candidate.
I’ve had some pretty good howlers from students, but the two stories that immediately came to mind come from other people.
One of the other grad students in my department was assigned to teach an intro course on biology for non-majors. Students were required to read a biology-related article in the New York Times every week and write up a two- to three-paragraph summary of the article. Students had to include the reason they chose the article they did and why they thought what the article reported was important.
One student chose an article about research on the origins of the Universe. He chose this topic because the Big Bang was a hugely destructive event, and we should all be working together to make sure it doesn’t happen again.
Yes, that’s for real.
Several years ago, I had a boyfriend who was a TA in the English department. At one point, he was teaching a composition course in which students had to hand in one brief paper every week. That gave him a lot of opportunities to reach the true nadir of student reasoning. One of the student’s papers had the topic sentence, “Without knowledge, we would not know half of what we know today.” My ex-boyfriend wrote in the margin, “Well, what about the other half?”
Yep, those one-paper-a-week comp courses really do bring out the best in student thought, whether it’s about history:
“The Bible is the best source for history because most of the people who read it will believe it.”
Or medicine:
“Pain is not a convenient feeling.”
Or entomology:
“If you felt something funny in your hair you would remove it. Whether it was a scorpion, a piece of paper, or any other sort of bug.”
This is one I’ve always liked(by a fellow student):
So ‘a’ can be any value?
Apparently he had never grasped the concept of variables. I always wondered how this moron managed to make it into my Grade 12 gifted Calculus class.
I had to take a freshman-level Comp course this semester because of the screwed up ways my transfer credit came over and you just have no idea. I lost ALL desire to do any editing EVER. It was physically painful.
And I heard a girl in a 4000 level class use “Ban-ded” in the restrictive/illegal sense. “They shouldn’t be banded from doing that.” Ye gods.
Teacher: What country is next to Afghanistan?
Student: Al-Qaeda!
Funny thing is - I don’t think anybody in the class noticed how incredibly funny her statement was. Such a waste… ;p
Teaira, thank you for my laugh of the day. 
I just got a paper today about cloning and its effects on humanbeens.
You’re a been, I’m a been, we’re all beens!
I began formal training on the flute fourteen years ago (wow, I feel old now) and I can only recognize a few key signatures. I’m sure that they were explained to me when they were introduced, but the actual names of the signatures never struck me as terribly important, as long as I could play them.
Maybe this is why I was such a lousy theory student (ended up dropping my music minor, I just couldn’t bring myself to care about the theory).
Now…notes, I don’t get. How can you not know the notes? I’m completely baffled. It’s like reading without knowing the alphabet.
Did anyone else start giggling about this sentance, or was it just me?
My grandmother was an elementary school teacher, and her favourite story was the time one student decided to show off the fancy new word he had learned while reading “The Night Before Christmas” out loud in class.
Student: Away to the window I tore like a flash,/ Tore open the shutters and vomited the sash
In my third year undergrad biochem class, we had a multiple choice question on the midterm asking for (IIRC) the correct name for the nucleoside form of T. The options were:
A) Thymine
B) Thymidine
C) Thymidylate
D) Thiamine (i.e. vitamin B1)
In the class following the exam, one student challenged that question on the grounds that thiamine is not a real word. The professor suggested that he should have a look at the side of a cereal box when he got home.
For my mandatory TA term in grad school, I got a lab course. One day, the students had to do an ELISA, where you start out with clear liquid that turns varying shades of yellow depending on how much of the substance you’re trying to detect is present. One student managed to make hers turn black. To this day I have absolutely no clue how she managed to get it to do that.
I am not a teacher, but I heard some good ones in advanced science courses in high school… now that I’m in college, most of the incredibly stupid things are just arrogant opinions stated as fact, and that’s not as fun.
Although I will nominate myself for one statement that came out of my mouth earlier this semester. I was presenting on a psychology article that analyzed the current literature on behavioral economics and the reduction of cocaine use. One of the studies had involved a voucher program (giving rehab clients tickets redeemable for neat stuff if they had clean urine tests). In order to be scientifically thorough, the researchers had to run a yoked study (another set of participants received vouchers at the same time as the first group, but with the vouchers unrelated to behavior).
Unsurprisingly, the researchers discovered that reduction in cocaine abuse recidivism and successful long-term abstinence was much more readily accomplished when the rewards were linked to behavior (first group) rather than when the rewards were noncontingent (yoked condition). However, I had been up until four-thirty a.m. that morning working on the project, and so how I expressed this was: “So the researchers concluded that giving people presents does not stop them from being crack addicts.”
The class was kind.
In high school my peers came up with good ones. When we learned that breakdown with age comes partially from losing the end bits of DNA strands as they are copied and recopied to make new cells, one girl wanted to know if that’s how anti-aging creams worked, by replacing the ends of the strands. Yes, dear… Revlon has genetic recombinant technology and the secret to eternal life.
I also had a long debate with somebody who insisted that we had pictures of our entire galaxy, from a camera that we had sent all the way outside.
As of yesterday, I now have something to post. I teach 5th grade at an “at-risk” Elementary School. I have had a student this year is is very mouthy. I’ll call him “Doug”. Doug has been in trouble for mouthing off to other students and fighting since the first day of school.
Yesterday, he got into a verbal/physical fight with another student on the playground at lunch time. Doug is a 5th grader; the other student, “Dave”, is a 4th grader.
When recess was over, Doug was heading to music. He stopped by Dave’s class and said to Dave’s teacher, "Tell Dave I’m going to kick his ass next recess.
Then, when Doug saw Dave going into his classroom, he said,
“Here comes the little f_ _ _ _ t now”
Some kids have a lot of nerve.
“I only scored thirty percent! Does these look like the answers of someone who only knew a third of the material?!”
How do you answer that question without sounding sarcastic?