A few years back a friend of mine was taking a 100 or 200 level philosophy course. The mid-term questions was along the lines of “Blah. Blah. Blah. Illustrate your point.” She gave a one or two sentence answer, then turned the paper over and drew a picture. Actually got an ‘A’.
On one hand, stupid. But on the other? Brilliant.
In 9th grade English class, we had an assignment to read a story and classify each sentence as simple, compound, complex, etc… Unfortunately, we did this in groups. One member of my group refused to believe that there could be any difference between a prepositional phrase and a subordinate clause. Sentences such as “I dropped the ball in the water” became complex sentences. He strenly refused to budge on this issue.
How do you know he didn’t just plagiarize the good stuff, too?
I would have done the same thing. This kid is obviously crying out for a decimal measuring system.
The latest incident of student stupidity came a few weeks ago when a student in my Freshman writing class mixed up possessive ‘s’ with plural ‘s’–her paper used them almost perfectly incorrectly.
When I pointed this out to her, in conference, she stood her ground: “No, that’s correct, the way I did it.”
Me: “Why do you say that?”
Her: “That’s what I was taught in high school.”
Me: “I don’t think so. You must be misremembering.”
Her: “Are you sure?”
Me: “Very sure.”
Her: “I don’t know about this.”
Me: “I am. Trust me.”
Her: “It looks right to me. And that’s what I was taught.”
long pause.
Me: “Well, you were taught wrong, then. This is the use of ‘s’ for plural, and this [referring to the chapter in the grammar text on forming possession] is the use for possession. You need to study this chapter immediately.”
Her: I won’t get marked down for this [indicating her paper] because I was just doing what I was taught in high school, will I? That’s so unfair.
[I understand the misuse of objective and nominative case, above, btw. It just looks less formal like this.]
I haven’t taught that much and I’ve only ever taught graduate courses, so I’ve seen few really stupid things. Two that come to mind were a blatant act of cheating on a CAD drawing, where the two files had the same CRC, date, and time stamp; and the second one was me telling the class “OK…I"m going to give you a point here. See this single equation I wrote on the whiteboard? THIS WILL BE ON THE MIDTERM.” All they had to do was remember a single, very important equation - and nearly half the class didn’t even remember it existed. It was 5% of the entire test, or half a letter grade.
Yeesh. Maybe things changed from when I was a student, but in my day when the prof told you “THIS WILL BE ON THE MIDTERM”, by God you remembered that!
Sm:)e, that’s not the most brilliant dumb thing - philosophy seems to be filled with them. One student I heard of in our state’s unviersity was given a final with one question - the single word “Why?” His answer - “Why not?”
I don’t know what that person ended up doing, but with the guts needed to answer an entire final exam with just “why not,” it must be something pretty interesting.
When I was an engineering undergraduate, I TA’ed freshman math classes. The professor once shared with us TA’s the following story:
A student had been handed back a graded test. On one question, he had gotten the answer right, but it was marked partially wrong. He brought the test up to the professor, who pointed out that even though he got the right answer, he had made two mistakes, which had by coincidence cancelled each other out. And it was these mistakes for which he had lost credit on the problem.
The student replied, “But that’s just my way of working the problem – and it’s better than yours, because I get the right answer even if I make mistakes.”
I was working at the writing center yesterday when the phone rang.
Me: Hello how can Ihelp you?
Student: I need to talk to somebody who had oneof Dr. Cook’s classes.
Me: I have. What’s your problem?
Student: Why did I get a D- on my midterm?
Me: Um…you’ll have to ask him that.
Student: I just can’t believe I got a D-. Why did I get D-? I heard he’s a hard grader, what am I supposed to do? How can I fix this?
Me: I’m sorry there are no more writing tutors this week. We won’t be back until January (I wasn’t working as a tutor at that moment). But…what did you write about?
Student: Well one question was about satire, using Mark Twain. One of the characteristics was the use of ing words. So I made a list of ing words as my answer.
How do you respond to that?
I took an accounting class once, and somehow we got on the discussion of finances of country stars. My prof talked about Hank Williams, Jr, and how his father was a country star too.
A girl asked, “What was his dad’s name?”
This same girl volunteered her love of all things Danielle Steele. She dropped out of the class soon after.
I’d heard that one, too, but it might not be an actual occurrence:
I’m sorry. I don’t understand that story at all. Most of these stories you can see some kind of deranged logic, e.g./ counting our 7/16 of an inch and thinking “seven little lines must be 0.7…”
But I really don’t understand the “ing words”. Huh-what?
I don’t know either. I have absolutely no idea what she was talking about. I’m assuming words like cooking and running, but what that has to do with satire and Mark Twain I’ll never know. She just called the center and asked if I was available to tutor on THursday or Friday. Hmmmmm, start my Christmas vacation early or go in and try to figure out what the hell is going on inside of her head? Decisions decisions.
I’m starting my holiday early.
During the Great American Teach In, a lady came in to talk to some 7th Grade Science classes about water (these kids just happen to be on my team). She brought in some jars filled with different types of water (river water, pond water, ect). She broke the class into groups and asked them questions. The first one was “What color is the water?” One kid argued with another student over the spelling of the word “tan.” He thought it was “ten”. Later, she asked them to smell the water and tell her what it smelled like. She had already told them it wasn’t water from the faucet. The same genius raised his hand and said “tap water”. She asked other questions during her time (about things like sedimentation and the like), and Genius raises his hand every time and answers “tap water”.
We don’t think he was being a shithead. Based on his behavior in other classes (like asking “So, uh, if I, like, do this assignment (long pause)… will it affect my grade?”), we believe he really thought he was giving the right answer.
God help us all.
During the Great American Teach In, a lady came in to talk to some 7th Grade Science classes about water (these kids just happen to be on my team). She brought in some jars filled with different types of water (river water, pond water, ect). She broke the class into groups and asked them questions. The first one was “What color is the water?” One kid argued with another student over the spelling of the word “tan.” He thought it was “ten”. Later, she asked them to smell the water and tell her what it smelled like. She had already told them it wasn’t water from the faucet. The same genius raised his hand and said “tap water”. She asked other questions during her time (about things like sedimentation and the like), and Genius raises his hand every time and answers “tap water”.
We don’t think he was being a shithead. Based on his behavior in other classes (like asking “So, uh, if I, like, do this assignment (long pause)… will it affect my grade?”), we believe he really thought he was giving the right answer.
God help us all.
I am going out on a limb, but my guess is that maybe she meant “n-words”? Because Mark Twain’s characters use the word frequently in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, etc. I have no idea, obviously, but that would make a weird sort of sense.
Yeah, considering the accent she has, it certainly could have been “n-word” and I kept hearing “ing word”. Weirder things have happened.
I’ll offer myself up for something I said today.
I was trying to explain to my friend Robyn that in the Pythagorean Theorem, c always refers to the hypotenuse of the triangle.
However, what I actually said was, “the hypothesis of the triangle…”
Well, this isn’t stupid so much as a malapropism, but I just finished marking an exam that refers repeatedly to the character of Agamemnon in The Importance of Being Earnest. (It was clear from the context that he meant “Algernon,” but I like the image of Agamemnon storming in wearing his Trojan War helmet and eating all of Lady Bracknell’s cucumber sandwiches…)
I forgot that I was going to tell a story, while I was at it.
In Physics my junior year of high school, the teacher brought in several super magnets, so called because of their incredible power to attract one another… and students. One girl in the class was fiddling around with a pair of them, and thought it would be hilarious to pinch her nose shut with them, by putting one on each side of her nose. It worked, so she said, “Hey, look at me!”
We all looked, which made her laugh. When she laughed, her nostrils flared, and the magnets flipped around, up, and inside of her nose, so that they were then pinching her septum and totally blocking any air from coming in through her nose. Took her and the teacher forever to get them out of there, and it looked and sounded pretty painful, too. The whole episode was pretty funny.