Monday, February 9, 2009

Captain Obvious...

I work in a junior high, which inevitably means that I am constantly surrounded by teenagers whose frontal lobes are not fully developed. While sometimes they drive me nuts with their spacey tendencies and their repetitious questions, their semi-dysfunctional brains also result in some great comments that leave me chuckling quietly to myself (and occasionally laughing hysterically out loud).

Today's story is really short, and may not be as funny to you all, but it made my day.

After school, we were conducting testing for the 6th grade students that are applying for 7th grade honors English. They were taking a multiple choice test about various skills and content that is completely tangential to the story, so I won't mention it. I was walking around, monitoring, and a girl raised her hand. So, I walked over to see what her question was. As I got closer, I saw that her eraser was no longer connected to her pencil.

"Did your eraser just fall off?"

"Yeah, it fell off while I was erasing."

Now maybe this response isn't as obvious as I thought, but at the moment I thought, "When else would your eraser have fallen off? Did we really need that clarification?"

These are the thought processes of my students...aspiring HONORS students no less. Gotta love them!

3 comments:

Robyn said...

It is ok, I had a student give me the same answer 3 times AFTER I told him that it was wrong and that he should try reading the directions again. Ah, teaching is wonderful!

Ashley said...

How I miss those days. Good luck putting your honors class together. I hope all is well at school. Miss you!

Ann said...

I don't know... I've heard of erasers spontaneously hurling themselves off of pencils for no apparent reason...