In a public speaking class, I made a cheery presentation on the pros of implementing mandatory organ harvesting from executed criminals, complete with suggested methods (and slides). Mit video!
It actually got a pretty healthy round of applause, and I even won over the guy who’d made the speech right before mine, on how President Bush should be impeached. I like to take that as meaning I wasn’t just preaching to the choir. 
I’ve always thought I should do that one day. I “get” most of it, but not all.
Another teacher here. In a senior physics class, the students had to design their own experiment as a major project. One group decided to see what would happen if you photocopy a mirror. The goal was to get an image of the innards of the photocopy machine, with great arguments in the class about whether they could do it. That didn’t work. Most of the class predicted that the image would be white from all the reflected light. Great surprise when it was black, with fingerprints and scratches showing. They came up with an explanation and tested it, and added images of lenses and other optical devices and completed a terrific project. Fantastic stuff.
The external examiners gave them a A+, and the topic was debated among physics teachers for years. It was about five years later that I discovered that their explanation was completely wrong! I have had students photocopying all sorts of optical devices ever since and got some fantastic optics knowledge into them through it.
Freshman year of college English. We had to answer a series of lists, and we did one every week for three weeks. The first list were trite things like favorite color, movie, etc.
Second list was a bit more indepth “Worst experience of your life…person you loved the most.”
Third list had three questions. “Name a person in the class you want to have sex with. Name a person in class you want to kill. Name a person in class you want to have a homosexual relationship with” This was three weeks into a freshman class in college, twas a bit of a wake up call.
:eek: Did anyone complain? :eek:
Thank you!
In 10th grade (all girls Catholic school) my religion teacher, who was a radical progressive Catholic who was kicked out of seminary for falling in love with his wife, assigned us all to chose a popular song and analyze it from a scriptural/Christian point of view. This was 1986, so a few girls took the easy way out and went with Stryper songs. Their grades were dinged for that, I think, because it was so obvious. The hippies chose Beatles and Dylan songs. I did “Don’t Dream It’s Over” by Crowded House. I still have the paper, I got a 98.5 on it, I lost 1.5 points because I used the NIV translation of the Bible I had at home rather than the officially sanctioned NAS. In retrospect, my exegesis was about what you’d expect from a tenth grader.
I should note that the same teacher who had us analyzing pop music also gave us an assignment to do a “picture book” retelling of a parable. Most girls went for drawings of various quality, some rather dubious. I enlisted my entire family at my grandmother’s birthday party and took photographs (with “Biblical costumes” made of bedsheets and pillowcases and blood effects made of tinted Karo syrup) to illustrate the story of the Good Samaritan. The girls in my class hated me for that one, because the teacher lavished me with praise for my extra effort.
In reality, I just knew that I couldn’t draw for toffee. I would’ve given him stick figures drawn with crayons if I couldn’t have taken pictures.
floccinaucinihilipilification I didn’t even know this was a real word. I still don’t think it is a real word, it is just too silly!!
Carry on.
Hmm… Grade 10 English.
I think my teacher like this one, but he made us have trials. There was one for the murder of Piggy from Lord of the Flies and one for Macbeth though I don’t recall what about it exactly. Several people were picked to act as lawyers, judge and the characters while the rest of the class was the jury. For whatever reason, I was chosen both times to be characters. I was one of the witches from Macbeth and I was one of the boys who had sand kicked in his face from Lord of the Flies.
We had to dress the parts even, so that was when I learned to tie a tie!
floccinaucinihilipilification:
Kinda fun to say. Can anyone use it in a sentence?
In 12th grade AP English (British Lit) we had an awesome teacher who assigned all sorts of interesting group projects. One of the best ones was to write and present our own Anglo-Saxon epic (a la Beowulf). Pretty much all of the submissions kicked ass, including:
One group themed their entire epic on (1997-era) politics: “Strong” Thurmond and his band of brave heroes took on the Evil King Notnilc and his queen.
One group named all their characters after something having to do with hair, and acted it out in front of the class with Barbie dolls.
Ours was a blast to do, as we set it in our school (the cafeteria was our “mead hall”) and enlisted various teachers, etc. to play bit parts in the video. Our principal played the High King (complete with Burger King crown and Princess Di-style wave-- he really hammed it up). Our AP Government/Int’l Politics teacher played the villain: he was an inveterate punster and so puns were his weapons of choice (until the heroes learned to fight back, at which point the villain hissed and cowered admirably).
The best part was that we got the 11th-grade English teacher (who was suitably bald) to put on a cassock and play the monk writing the whole thing down: we would cut from the action to him inserting phrases such as “by the grace of Almighty God” into the narrative, to symbolize the Christianization of an older story. (We didn’t give him any of the text before we filmed him, so his reactions at some of the weirder bits were priceless.) Plus, one of our group members was studying advanced German at the time and came up with subtly scatological/rude names for most of the characters.
In the same class we also had projects such as a raft debate among the British Romantic poets (Byron won hands-down, although we, representing Coleridge, almost swept the competition with our advertisement for “Ladies’ Night at the Pleasure Dome”) and our own addenda to the Canterbury Tales (featuring such modern-day characters as televangelists and used-car salesmen).
FlyingRat, I’m kicking myself for not having gone to the same high school as you! Too cool.
Can I use this thread to vent? In 7th grade we had an assignment to keep a diary. Afterward, the teacher put the diaries out on a table and let everyone read them! :mad:
In 8th grade, we were told to write about our family. The teacher showed them to our parents at parent-teacher conference time! :mad:
I didn’t mind the assignments, but I did mind not knowing who was going to read them. I wouldn’t have written a lot of things that I did if I had known who would be reading them — e.g., classmate I had a crush on, black sheep relatives.