One of our much-lauded favourite bloggers, Duke Fandango, recently reminded me of one of the unique joys of being a teacher. Though we are authority figures, the kids we teach often tend to kind of forget we're human beings with functioning ears sometimes. They'll say anything off-the-cuff or totally out of place right in front of us because, in their amygdala-dominated brains, they sort of assume we either don't listen or don't understand them. This leads to many moments of hilarity for us.
Many of us teacher candidates will be going into the classroom in about two short weeks, so we want everyone to get in the mood for anonymous comical comment-sharing from the get-go! When you hear your students say something truly ridiculous or so clever you choke with laughter, send it to us at
class.dismissed.blog@gmail.com. We'll collect them all and publish a collection as often as we can!
History Teacher: "Ah, sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll. Well, I definitely did the rock 'n' roll bit. Not the drugs, though. And uh... Hm. So did you all do the assignment?"
Student: "Is there anything I can do to make this grade better?"
Teacher: "Uh, do better work."
Teacher, incredulously: "You never read Harold and the Purple Crayon?!"
Student: "Well, sorry, I was reading Machiavelli."
History professor, lecturing on the early 1900s: "I mean, the problem of being the only person with a telephone is, well, who you gonna call?"
Class, in unison: "Ghostbusters!"
History professor: "You kids scare me."
Teacher: "Jordan! Can you tell us the answer to the problem on the board?"
Student talking in back of class: "Um... no sir."
Teacher: "You are interrupting the class! What were you talking about?"
Student: "Petroleum lightsabers."
Labels: History, our job is awesome, overheard in the classroom, students, teacher blog