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Issue 93
The Lighter Side of Education
Brent Mortensen
Due the often hectic pace of a high school student’s school year, some
of my students provide more than enough humorous material to make me
pause, but they always keep me smiling. The following are my favorites:
-Watching a part of the new movie, The Phantom of the Opera, as a basis
for an essay on beauty, a student asked: "Is this a true story?"
-A student wanted to know, after the class was told it could work in
pairs, if they were to work in pairs of ones or twos.
-After an especially long block period, and waiting for the bell to
ring, a student posed the question, "How long is five minutes?"
-In math a student suggested that isolating a variable meant putting ice
on something.
-During a discussion on the value of thinking through your response
before responding, a student recommended, "you can't think thoughts."
-Talking about mood and atmosphere in novels and how authors use the
seasons to help suggest what characters are experiencing, one student
asked "What season comes after Winter?" and then provided the answer,
"Isn't it Spring?"
-One student wanted, when working on an assignment about setting, to use
"grassy lawn" in her sentence.
-A science teacher reported that his favorite question, asked just a few
weeks ago, was what ice melted into.
-Someone commented in Chemistry "even chemicals have feelings."
-When I reminded the class not to use contractions in a formal essay,
one young man asked me what contractions were. I wasn't sure if that was
a good "thing" or a bad "thing."
So, as you enjoy summer vacation, I hope that those of you who have
children will encourage them, along with their other summer activities,
to remember their studies and to read. For those of you whose children
cannot yet read, read to them as often as possible. For as Henry David
Thoreau wrote in Walden, "books are the treasured wealth of the world
and the fit inheritance of generations and nations."
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