Classroom Stories

 

Classroom Stories

After a day of listening to my eighth graders exchange gossip, I decided to quote Mark Twain to them: “It is better to keep your mouth closed and let people think you are a fool than to open it and remove all doubt.”

After considering my words, one of my students asked, “What does it mean to remove all doubt?”

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For 98 percent of the students at the school where my wife teaches, English is a second language. But that didn’t stop them from giving her Christmas cards. Still, their enthusiasm for the occasion sometimes exceeded their grasp of English. Among the many cards that flooded her desk were: “Happy Birthday, Grandma,” “Get Well Soon,” and “Congratulations on Passing Your Driving Test!”

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Walking through the hallways at our middle school, I saw a new substitute teacher standing outside his classroom with his forehead against a locker. I heard him mutter, “How did you get yourself into this?”
Knowing he was assigned to a difficult class, I tried to offer moral support. “Are you okay?” I asked. “Can I help?”
He lifted his head and replied, “I’ll be fine as soon as I get this kid out of his locker.”

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I recently ran into an old student of mine, who said, “I always liked you. You never had favourites. You were mean to everyone.”

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When our school librarian announced she was changing schools, my fellow teacher asked a student, “Why do you think Ms. Richardson is leaving?”
The third grader opined, “Because she’s read all our books?”

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My father began teaching business classes at the local prison through a community college. On his first night of class, he started a chapter on banking. During the course of his lecture, the subject of ATMs came up, and he mentioned that, on average, most machines contain only about $1,500 at a given time.
Just then a man in the back raised his hand. “I’m not trying to be disrespectful,” he told my father, “but the machine I robbed had about $5,000 in it.”

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Performing Mozart should have been the highlight of my middle school chorus class. But after a few uninspired attempts, an exasperated student raised her hand and said, “Mrs. Willis, we want to sing music from our generation, not yours.”

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A junior in my English class gave a big thumbs-down to the autobiography he’d read. His reason: “The author talks about only himself.”

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When one girl had finished the English portion of the state exam, she removed her glasses and started the math questions.

“Why aren’t you wearing your glasses?” she was asked.

She responded, “My glasses are for reading, not math.”

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 During a parent-teacher conference, a mother insisted I shouldn’t have taken points off her daughter’s English paper for calling her subject Henry 8 instead of Henry VIII.

“We have only regular numbers on our keyboard,” she explained. “No Roman numerals.”

Courtesy of Reader’s Digest