Wow.
My friend Eddie posted an entry the other day about some of the dumb things that students say. We can only hope, we teachers, that the students genuinely don’t realize how dumb they really sound; to think otherwise would be to begin a spiral into despair from which few of us would recover.
In the vein of “if it didn’t actually happen to me, I wouldn’t believe it,” I’m going to share this little nugget with you.
By majority vote, we decided to read To Kill a Mockingbird in my I/II class. The kids started reading last night, and this morning, I put a “choose one question” quiz on the board for their free write time. Each of the questions was pretty straight forward; I asked them to tell me about the narrator, or to describe the setting and explain why is it important, or to analyze a particularly important (and kind of funny) scene that happens in chapter 2.
Hand to God, this is an exact transcription of one of the papers I received at the end of class:
Mrs. Chili. I have only read up to page 11. So I cant really answer these questions. I have only read to 11 because I had alot to do last night and I did not use my time as well as i could have. I opend the book at about 10:00 and read untill I almost passed out. I am very sorry and I hope you know i am doing my best to do good and pass this and all my classes and here at CHS.
To which I responded:
Okay, Jan, but you understand I can’t give you credit for work you don’t do….
Oy.
