Those Darn Kids

More teacher stories!

1. My cousin Danielle is adopting two babies from Africa. YAY! One of my students asked if I could come to his hockey game on Saturday, and I said, "I don't know...I might be going to Kalamazoo this weekend if my cousin gets her babies." He asked about the adoption, saying, "They deliver the babies from Africa to here!?" I said yes, because the babies are flown to Chicago where my cousin will go pick them up. Apparently I did not explain this well, because my student ran out into the hall and I heard him exclaim to his friends, "Did you know they MAIL babies?! Like, in BOXES? They'll deliver 'em right to your house!" Oops...

2. One of my girls showed me a collection of poems she wrote about the boy that she "loves." He currently has a different girlfriend, and she is angry about it. One of her poems told the boy to "Go to Hell...on the inside" because the outside is too beautiful. HA! I'm glad it's only the outside that she's concerned with...middle school relationships are so deep.

3. We were discussing the vocabulary word "convey." We talked about how "convey" means to explain something. I asked students for examples on how people convey things.
Jimmy: In writing?
Me: Sure!
Jenny: Through song?
Me: Definitely?
John: Through a painting?
Me: Um, okay!
Jackie: On their conveyor belt?
Me: Uh...that's a little bit different...

Nice attempt at a connection, but it didn't really work. Oh well. Nice try, kid.

4. One of my star student "good girls" came up to me during spelling class and said, "Mrs. Webb, how do you spell 'condom'?" Quite startled, I asked why she needed to know. She said that she was doing a word un-scramble, and one of the words was "condom." Doubtful, I asked to look at her paper. When she showed it to me, I was relieved to say, "Oh, that word is actually 'condemn.'" She said "Thanks!" and happily went back to her seat. I am confident that she has no idea the difference between the words "condom" and "condemn," but the huge difference between those words made the encounter quite amusing to me. :-)