When I was talking to the interviewer right before my first radio program, she was stressing to me that it was important not to be nervous so she said, “just think about all those students you have stood up in front of over the years, and they weren’t even interested in what you were saying; the radio audience is.”
I thought that was pretty perceptive of her and so true. After the interview I was still laughing about her words of encouragement and mentioned them on Facebook, where I reminded old teacher friends of some of our funny experiences with students, and they added theirs on Facebook as well.
One of my favorites happened years ago while another English teacher and I were standing at our doors while students passed from class to class. We were always supposed to be at our doors on “duty” during these times, but it never felt like duty; it was a reprieve from the class when we could share stories or simply talk to another adult.
She was teaching “A Tale of Two Cities,” and had created a bulletin board (this was the tortuous part for us secondary folks—we were not into displays like our elementary counterparts), that corresponded with the book. She had quite a creative group of over achievers who appeared unusually quiet that day.
When the bell rang, she found them all at their desks with their books out pretending to be engrossed in reading. Since this was a bit odd to say the least she looked around the room to see what mischief they might have been involved in and there it was on her bulletin board. They had changed the letters to read, “A Sale of Two Titties.” You have to give them an A for creativity!!
How about these:
- One teacher reminded me of the less than stellar student who wrote a paper about the Four Runners of Romanticism.
- Apparently the Pulitzer Prize was difficult for more than one student because two teachers shared:
one wrote about the “Pullet’s Surprise” and
another who thought the award was for the “Poet’s Surprise”!
We, however, were never surprised!!
Those are memories that you just can’t buy—(on our salaries we wouldn’t have been able to). No, you just had to earn them.
Do you have any funny student stories? Please write them in the comments.