You can blame all this on Keely, the Un Mom.
This week's randomnesses are all from last Tuesday, and all happened in one day, in my classroom. Remember that, and pray for me.
The children are working on a project in science. We are studying genetics, on a 6th grade level. In order for them to get hands-on experience (heh) in seeing how genes are passed between generations, each kid was assigned a Beanie Baby from my collection. They were then assigned random partners, and needed to select traits to designate as dominant or recessive and use Punnett Squares to determine what the offspring of the two would look like.
One student's paper started like this: Our second generation offspring was butt ugly.
After I stopped crying with laughter, I let him know he would need to change it to something a little more polite. Now it says: Our second generation offspring was not pretty.
I liked the original better.
*******
One of my students was looking through my books for something to read. "Anything with lots of violence," he said. As I was looking in the Classics basket for The Hobbit, he told me, "Mrs. Wyatt, there's a book with a bad word in there."
I start prepping for the discussion of the N- word, thinking he refered to Huck Finn or To Kill a Mockingbird, when he holds up a book of poetry and covers up all but the "Dick" in Emily Dickinson.
Thanks, buddy. She was a wild one, that Emily.
*******
Last week, we had several girls show up on our first eighty-degree day wearing shorts short enough that you could see all the way to Argentina.* After we passed out the spare pairs of nasty-ass sweatpants for them to put on while they waited for appropriate clothes from home, some of the other kids inquired if teachers had a dress code. I explained the need to dress professionally, and that even on casual Fridays, we wear nice jeans, not frayed or raggedy.
The next morning, one of the girls said, "You know how you were telling us about the teacher dress code? I think Mrs. Art Teacher from last year broke the rules a bunch of times." She was right, but what could I say? "Well, honey, I'm just glad I'm not the principal!"
*******
A student came in bearing a piece of homework that was a wrinkled, stained, unreadable mess. He then told us, "If you sniff right here, it still smells like coffee!" Scratch-and-Sniff homework? Help.
* All apologies to Randy Newman
The children are working on a project in science. We are studying genetics, on a 6th grade level. In order for them to get hands-on experience (heh) in seeing how genes are passed between generations, each kid was assigned a Beanie Baby from my collection. They were then assigned random partners, and needed to select traits to designate as dominant or recessive and use Punnett Squares to determine what the offspring of the two would look like.
One student's paper started like this: Our second generation offspring was butt ugly.
After I stopped crying with laughter, I let him know he would need to change it to something a little more polite. Now it says: Our second generation offspring was not pretty.
I liked the original better.
*******
One of my students was looking through my books for something to read. "Anything with lots of violence," he said. As I was looking in the Classics basket for The Hobbit, he told me, "Mrs. Wyatt, there's a book with a bad word in there."
I start prepping for the discussion of the N- word, thinking he refered to Huck Finn or To Kill a Mockingbird, when he holds up a book of poetry and covers up all but the "Dick" in Emily Dickinson.
Thanks, buddy. She was a wild one, that Emily.
*******
Last week, we had several girls show up on our first eighty-degree day wearing shorts short enough that you could see all the way to Argentina.* After we passed out the spare pairs of nasty-ass sweatpants for them to put on while they waited for appropriate clothes from home, some of the other kids inquired if teachers had a dress code. I explained the need to dress professionally, and that even on casual Fridays, we wear nice jeans, not frayed or raggedy.
The next morning, one of the girls said, "You know how you were telling us about the teacher dress code? I think Mrs. Art Teacher from last year broke the rules a bunch of times." She was right, but what could I say? "Well, honey, I'm just glad I'm not the principal!"
*******
A student came in bearing a piece of homework that was a wrinkled, stained, unreadable mess. He then told us, "If you sniff right here, it still smells like coffee!" Scratch-and-Sniff homework? Help.
* All apologies to Randy Newman
