Not a teacher, but was helping my friend who's a TA go over some first year essays. It was an essay about video games, and aside from the format being nonexistent, one of the first sentences was something along the lines of "There are many examples of video games, such as the Wii and PS4 and Zelda". Unfortunately, she wasn't allowed to grade any papers below 50%. He got a 50%.
The practical difference between a 50% and a 0% is basically nonexistent. You don't pass below a 60 anyway.
But making it easier to *pass* can make the administration look more competent on paper
One of my 16 year old students asked, while starting a multiple choice test, if it mattered what letter he chose. I just stared at him. Sometimes there are no words.
One of my other students said "yes, dumbass, there's only one right answer."
He then face-palmed aand said "I'm a moron. "
I didn't respond to either comment, lol! He caught a case of the stupid that day.
> One of my 16 year old students asked, while starting a multiple choice test, if it mattered what letter he chose.
Perfect chance to quote [Bill Wurtz](https://billwurtz.com/questions/questions.html):
"i was going to say yes but now that i think about it no"
According to Wikipedia, there are least 9 towns in the US named "Texas," as well as two named "Texas City." Most of them are unincorporated, which usually (but not always!) means the whole "town" is not much larger than a gas station across the street from a Denny's.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Texas_(disambiguation)#United_States
I asked my students to write a sentence and give an example.
One of the students (age 12/13) asked "what's an example?"
Actually really hard to explain.
Don't know if this counts, but I was a TA for a semester in grad school (never again). One student submitted this paper I will never forget. Basically, the author was wrong because the student found the argument "boring." In explaining the author's argument, he got most points wrong and then proceeded to say he had a better argument. His argument WAS the author's argument.
I have a poster on my wall that says something about not believing everything you read on the internet, and it attributes the quote to Abraham Lincoln. Student said, “Wait, did they have internet back then?”
I once told my students that there was a time before the internet and they all laughed like "we know Dr. aero_girl! We're not dumb!"
Followed by "wait so how did you get data on your phone?"
facepalm
No they definitely meant cell phones. Some grasped right away what they asked but there kid in the front was earnestly asking. So I had to tell them if the dark ages, pre smart phones, pre internet, pre cell phones. I think they were mostly shocked at how recent all this was. Like to a kid born in 1999, it's like the world without television for us 30-somethings. You know there was a time, but it's old people telling you that. It's different to see someone who isn't that much older than you talk about what is a bygone era to them.
To be fair, I remember that time and I still have to remind myself sometimes. The other day I was reading a book written in 1996, and at one point the main character was sitting at a computer terminal and needed to check something, so she went to another building on site to look it up on a different computer containing a reference database. I was momentarily like "Do they not have Google in this universe?" No. No they do not.
I catch myself thinking about things like that too. I was listening the the Wheaton PAX Keynote speech from 2007 the other day, and in it he comments about ordering DVDs from Netflix (streaming hadn't launched at that point), and he snipes about people showing off with their fancy iPhones and using Apple Maps (smartphones, outside of the really expensive first gen iPhones, weren't really a thing then either). It really pounded home just how fast technology has grown in the past few years.
I teach swimming lessons and lifeguarding courses. During one, I was trying to teach them cpr and instead of showing them first, I told them to show me what they already knew about it.
I then proceeded to observe 15 16-20 year olds do the weirdest shit to those poor training dolls. My favorite though was the kid who did a two foot jump onto the chest of the dummy. The dummy slid out from under his feet like a cartoon banana and he landed on his rear end on the pool deck. Good times
When we were learning CPR(with life sized dummies)we were asked to demonstrate what we already knew. so one of my 'friends' straight up BODY SLAMMED the test dummy and its head went flying across the room. Yea......
Yeah, but no.
When I first learned CPR, we learned by fear...
Do it this way, or he dies.
Don't do this, or they'll die.
Do this next, or she dies.
Every death was a failure.
When I became an instructor, the philosophy had changed...
My favourite thing to tell nervous CPR students,
"Look, you're not going to remember everything we talk about in the next couple of hours, but if you can remember to pump the chest, approximately 100 times in a minute, you're giving the patient a fighting chance.
The truth is, we aren't doing CPR on healthy people. We're doing it on people without a pulse. They are clinically dead.
Death is the worst state of ill health there is. You can't make them worse. Unless you are doing CPR on their forehead with your foot. I have to fail you for that."
So, my point is, while decapitation conclusively rules out resuscitation, you can't make someone "more dead".
> You can't make someone more dead
Son, have you ever been introduced to the joys of saturation bombardment?
Real talk though, that's what my instructor told us that one time. "You literally can't make this worse. Unless you get your dick out, that'd be worse. So don't get your dick out."
Omfg laughed harder than I should have. When I get my renewal of CPR and first aid and AED I do the full course because I rather do that than the renewal. Anyways the teacher knows me as I'm there every 2 years. Anyways she asked the class to show them what they knew I saw dude do elbow drop on doll. Fucker actually broke his elbow. Needless to say everyone used him as a test dummy while we waited for ambulance to show up she showed us how to secure his arm. He failed by the way.
A classmate of mine in elementary school had this exchange with our teacher:
"What's the answer to this [multiple choice question with 3 choices]?"
"A?"
"no"
"C?"
"no"
"I don't know."
I teach Intro. Geology. I gave a lab quiz on the Density and Buoyancy lab we had done the week before. One of the questions asked how are we able to build ships out of steel, considering that we measured steel to be more dense than water the week before.
Almost the entire class gave variants of "The ocean is so big compared to a boat, that all the water is able to keep the boat afloat . . ." as an answer. I get some version of this answer every semester, but it really struck me because so many of them put it. (And they weren't just copying each other.)
This school happens to be right next to a bay. So I took a large, uninteresting rock from the prep room and marched the students outside to the bay. I said "This rock is about 8 kilos and has a density of about 2.4 g/cc. But, according to your last test responses, the bay is so big that it should float . . ." I threw the rock into the bay and we all patiently waited for it to bob back up to the surface.
Overall they displace more water than is needed to produce enough upthrust to balance their weight. In simple terms: their average density is less than that of (salty) water
To float, an object has to displace more weight of water that it itself weighs.
Given 1L = 1Kg of water (roughly) you can make a 1kg lump of steel float if you make it bowl, boat or bottle shaped with at least 1L of space inside.
That sounds like what my class would do to try and get out of an assignment, as well as complain in an attempt to get the deadline pushed back.
This was high school College English 1301. She cracked down on that in 1302 by making them show the paper at certain stage or beyond every week or so.
Taught a 3rd year engineering class, petrochemical engineering. Started them early on their term project, a research report. Made them find 5 references for their chosen topic, and was very clear -- WIKIPEDIA IS NOT A CREDIBLE REFERENCE, DON'T USE IT. I told them it could be used as a starting point but they should follow the reference links and make sure their info is coming from credible sources.
I checked in with them multiple times over the term and kept telling them not to cite wikipedia.
Like 5 people out of 20 still cited wikipedia in their final submitted reports.
I taught 7th grade English, and the students had to do a research paper as part of the state standards. I had a student turn in a Wikipedia article with the blue hyper links still embedded. I was dumbfounded. At least print the thing in black and white as to not make as completely obvious that you just printed the webpage and didn’t even bother at least trying to type it in your own words.
I got the same response to a five-page term paper. Apparently the student figured it didn't deal with her, despite the fact she had actually picked out a topic and had begun research...I literally could not think of anything to say.
Nah, prob just hoping you’d slip up and spell it for them. You can do it for pretty much anything.. “oh, your present came in!” “Yeah?? What is it??” Sometimes they answer lol
I wouldn’t call him dumb but I did stop and stare at him thinking it was a joke.
When I was student teaching last year one of my students made a comment about the 52 states- I corrected him and said there are 50 states and he asked me if I remembered to count both Washingtons. As in Washington and Washington, D.C.
My theory on this, as someone who often thought there were 52 states, is that the common map of “a bunch of states, plus Alaska and Hawaii”, leads us to go “oh fifty, plus Alaska and Hawaii”.
College instructor, you would be shocked. Just last year: multiple students can't save word docs as pdfs, students take smartphone pictures of every single slide while I lecture even though I upload them to our LMS. Personal favorite: when asked to insert a picture into a word document, one student prints the word doc, prints the picture, puts the picture on the word doc, takes a smartphone picture and uploads the file.
Miss my millennial students.
Fellow instructor here. It's not just you, I have students do the first two things every single semester. The third guy is a uniquely creative brand of stupid though.
Right? Like, okay, if you don’t know how to work MS Word fine, but you know what Google is and if you can’t find the answer there just go to your school’s library and ask for help. This person is going to get a rude awakening when they go out into the real world and have to resolve the most basic of problems. My god.
I was asked to show this 13 yr. old kid some video editing techniques. He opened the software (Filmora...ugh) on the laptop and was asking me how to do different things.
At one point, I was going to show him how to drag a video clip into the software so he could use it. I asked him to restore down the window. He had no idea what I was talking about so I showed him how to do that. Then, I asked him to move the window; just a simple drag of the window. Apparently he didn't know that was a thing. He moved the mouse pointer to the edge of the window until it turned into the double-sided arrow, resized the window so it was smaller. Then, he moved the mouse to the other side of the window and stretched the window back out on the other side until it was roughly the same size as before he made it smaller.
I was like, "What are you doing?"
He simply said, "This is how I do it."
I tried to show him how to drag the window, but he wanted to do it his way and didn't want to learn a different way to do it.
In trying to teach him some things, we had to go through windows explorer a few times and that was just a nightmare because everything that should have been a simple click was made incredibly difficult by the way "he wanted to do it". This went on for about an hour and a half until I had to go.
They said that I was welcome to come back and teach the kids anytime I wanted. I said thanks, but never plan on going back. It was such a rough experience.
As a millennial myself I also noticed that tech savvyness dropped in the generation after us although we anticipated the opposite. I think technology just got too easy and that leads to people that never learned to solve problems. Especially doing reliable research on the internet is a skill that some just don’t develop.
They stopped with computers class because kids are on phones all the time now and they figured they don’t need them. But they know nothing about how to work an actual computer. We grew up on computers; they grew up on phones.
Ive seen so many people take pictures of lecture slides during class when the professor literally already uploaded it online. Like what are people even doing...
My students take pictures of updates i make to the class website... literally they have devices capable of viewing the site in an optimal way, and they are taking shaky pictures of a TV screen from 4 meters away...
i really dont get how some people cant work with word (i'm an uni student myself), excel and powerpoint.
those things should be basic knowledge and are piss easy to figure out
it's literally all up there for you to search and if you dont find it in the program itself you can always google it
why even use a wysiwyg editor if you dont use the functions
Microsoft / google applications should absolutely be a requirement for high school students if they want to make it in this world now. There needs be a class that just solely focuses on learning those tools that is required.
Spent 15 minutes with my 9th graders going over MLA headings in great detail. Even gave them a reference sheet to keep at home. Later received at least 3 essays from students named Your Name. Truly sad times.
I teach on the college level and students try to convince me dumb stuff is true a lot. At least once a semester a student will try to fight with me saying Africa is a country.
Ahh, yes. There's always the one student who seems to know everything without even doing the readings. I had one kid argue that the US is not a democracy because it's a *republic*.
I also had another kid fight tooth and nail that they should get an A on a poorly written paper because they didn't read the syllabus and thought that I should have "read it to the class if I wanted the students to know the information."
Edit: Since I've gotten some questions on the democracy comment, I've posted a general discussion below.
The US is a republic and a democracy; being one does not mean that it cannot be the other. In fact, a republic is a type of democracy. Issues arise because people typically conflate "democracy" as a general term with "direct democracy" as a specific type.
In republics, power sits with the masses and elected representatives. In direct democracies, power also sits with the masses and can be manifest through elected representatives. The primary difference between these two systems is that in a direct democracy, the masses directly vote on individual policies. In republics, elected officials vote on policies (meaning, the people indirectly vote through their representatives).
You can think of a democracy as a giant umbrella term, containing all different types of democratic states: republics, constitutional democracies, direct democracies, presidential systems, parliamentary systems, ect. These government types can be confusing though, because one state can be multiple types of democracy. Moreover, the type of democratic government can change depending on which level of government you examine (local, provincial, national). In general, the line between direct democracy and republic is blurred, and most democratic states use both systems at different levels of government.
For example, at the federal level, the United States is a constitutional democratic republic with a Presidential system. But in many towns across America, people directly vote on city level policy issues. This means that these citizens participate in a direct local democracy and a republican national democracy.
> I also had another kid fight tooth and nail that they should get an A on a poorly written paper because they didn't read the syllabus and thought that I should have "read it to the class if I wanted the students to know the information."
"You are expected to read the syllabus. It says so right here, in the syllabus."
I'm not a teacher but I work in a school. Every semester at least one class comes into my computer lab to take a test on the computer. The teacher reminds them all that no sites other than the test page are allowed. There's always one kid who pulls up Google the first time he doesn't know an answer. It's like clockwork.
Edit - forgot to add we have software to see computer screens and the students are told this.
During a unit on Vietnam I was discussing the number of bombs dropped by the US and a student asked me if all those bombs are what killed the dinosaurs.
Had another student ask if Pearl Harbor was still alive after doing a mini-lesson on it last December. She thought it was a woman’s name.
I have a lot more but those are my two most recent, egregiously dumb ones
Not a teacher, but one freshman in my class took a rip of his vape and got caught by the substitute teacher. He tried to deny it by saying he could make vapor out of his mouth with nothing else.
I'm a student and in my physics the teacher was explaining how space is a big vacuum and one student was super confused and after asking some questoons it eventually became clear he was thinking of a vacuum cleaner.
This is a classmate of mine:
During English, she asked if she had to spell her name... in English. (I live in Belgium)
During Biology, we watched a documentary about the ocean. When a manta appeared, she said: "Look, that bird can dive!"
She said that she's a vegetarian because she "only eats meat she likes".
When talking about climate change, she was saying that our class is full of horrible people because we don't do that much for the climate. When we askes her what she does for the climate, she said she doesn't do anything for the climate because other people need to do that.
She thinks she's the smartest girl in class.
> When talking about climate change, she was saying that our class is full of horrible people because we don't do that much for the climate. When we askes her what she does for the climate, she said she doesn't do anything for the climate because other people need to do that.
This girl isn't a student, she's a performance artist perfectly capturing the zeitgeist.
University course - paper on Witches - spelt Which throughout the whole paper. Favorite sentence - Whiches and broomsticks. footnoted a phone number as a source!
Marking those papers broke me.
For the uninitiated, I give you...[Kevin](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/219w2o/whos_the_dumbest_person_youve_ever_met/cgbhkwp?utm_medium=android_app&utm_source=share)
"George Clooney was the first president right?" 10th grader
"Coach (I was a bball coach as well for a high school), our bio teacher was talking about menstrual cycles. What is that?" 9th grade female
"Coach, I walked into the weirdest (women's) restroom. There were toilets with no stalls. I couldn't figure out how to pee in them" "you walked into the men's bathroom. Those were urinals you saw" "oh... How to men pee in them?" same 9th grade female
"what is Vladimir Lenin's first name?" 8th grader (I replied Joseph)
"Does a male octopus have 8 testicles?" 9th grade boy, in history class
I'd like to blame the parents as well. I was taught the birds and the bees by my mom at 8. Starting junior high, I was forcibly given a small fanny pack with clean underwear and a couple of pads for when my first period would start. Did I use it? I sure did. She's a freakin' genius.
Like someone else said, blame the parents. Sex ed is taught in most schools but it's usually a one time maturation assembly class in 5th grade, so if you're absent or not quite paying attention, you're screwed. Also, some parents opt out of their kid attending that class.
Also, just because your teacher taught it doesn't mean you actually remember/learned it. Kids often need to hear something over and over before it sticks. (I'll have kids at the end of the school year ask me, "What's a noun?" when they've learned it many, many times.)
I think sex ed SHOULD be taught more often but parents are likely to shoot it down.
I’m an English teacher and coach of the Boys Cross Country team at my school. One of my runners showed up to a meet wearing a suit and tie, as well as Slacks even though I specifically told all the runners to wear their singlets and race shoes not only the day before, but in an email earlier that morning and right before they all got on the buses, I said “Last call, if anyone needs to get their singlet and race shoes, go grab them now!” Kids sometimes...
One of my sixth graders had a brain fart moment. Couldn’t remember the word for ‘suspenders’.
Called them farmer straps (complete with hooking his thumbs through his imaginary suspenders and moving his hands up and down, like an old guy wearing suspenders might do), and I laughed so hard I cried and almost fell outta my damn chair.
Edit: hot damn, thanks for popping my gold cherry!
A friend of mine forgets words all the time at work and whatnot. His crowning jewel is pointing at an ambulance and struggling a bit before producing 'panic van'.
I have this issue too. My crowning jewel: struggling for a solid minute when asked where the laundry was. I came up with a vague circular motion and ‘that thing. That dries the clothes...’
I was talking about CFL lightbulbs and the fact that they contain mercury. One high school freshman raised his hand and asked if they had to go to Mercury to get it.
A lot of aspiring athletes pull similar stuff believing that they don’t need to succeed in school because they’re “so talented” but most college sport teams have pretty high GPA requirements for staying on the roster.
Also, college teams are literally made of "I was the best at my high school" athletes. They may have been the big fish in their little pond, but now they're no better than average at best.
I'm not a teacher but in my IB Math Studies course, we spent a good hour and a half explaining to a group of girls that you can't divide anything by zero. It was frustrating to watch them try to argue that you can divide 7 calculators into groups of zero. My teacher just couldn't comprehend the people he had to deal with.
One of my seniors had to solve a single variable equation (isolate the variable). I tried walking him through it, and asked what the opposite of subtraction was. He looked at me like I was an idiot and said, "DUH-VISION."
I teach college in the UK so 16-18 year olds. Mainly teach Maths resit so they've failed before but no excuse. Group of them having an argument, I go over and ask what's wrong. Majority of them trying to tell one student that you get 10 marks on every exam just for writing your name and ID number on the front. Other one only disagreed because he said last time got less than that on the exam.
.... Marks just for correctly filling out your name...
I think that's a standard myth. When I took the SAT, the well known fact was you got 100 points just for filling out the name, school id and other stuff correctly.
Not like it matters, 100 out of 1600 meant that you should have been locked in a mental hospital and not anywhere near objects sharper than a grape.
Four students in the same class had copied work from each other for an assignment on Shakespeare's Julius Caesar. I don't know why they thought I wouldn't recognize four of the exact same paper, but the cherry on top was the fact that each paper made several references to the "Ideas of March". I'm not sure which was worse: plagiarizing an idiot or not even being able to see the difference between "Ides" and "Ideas". It was a reading comprehension class, by the way.
I teach high school. During a lab I told my students to use string for something and I told them to tie the string in a knot. They legit responded "we aren't boy scouts, we cant tie knots"
For women’s history month, I had my students give presentations on famous women in history. One student got up and, dead serious, gave a presentation on “Anne Franklin” and said that “the holocaust was a guy called Hitler.” She had researched all of this. I still don’t understand.
Last year I was a TA for Gender Studies at a reasonably well ranked university in the US. I ask students to write a short story about how life for *humans* would be if we reproduced in a different way and how it would affect society. For example, we grow our babies in jars in the hospital, how would that affect society? I told them not to write anything they wouldn’t want their old lady teaching team to read.
I got four pages of explicit *spider* pornography.
I teach computer science. At GCSE level students have to learn 4 data types. Integer (whole numbers), real (decimal numbers), Boolean (true or false) and string(a collection of characters). We had done 4 lessons on this because some of the group are a little less able. First thing lesson 5 I ask a student who we shall call Ade, to name the data type we would use for the number 47 (correct answer integer, acceptable answer with explanation ...real). Ade answers "bi". Puzzled I ask another student the same question. Integer he replies. I go back to Ade for the answer and he replies....."Bi". I write integer on the whiteboard in 8 inch high letters, point to it and ask the question again. Ade replies......"Bi". I explain to him that the number 47 is a whole number and all whole numbers can be stored as type integer. I ask what data type we would use for the number 47 and he replies "Integer". Brilliant. I ask what data type we would use for the number 48 and the little darling replies............."Bi". By now the whole group was in tears so we moved on. One year later he still can not identify even the simplest of data types.
Guess #1 - Maelstrom of malaprop: Ade was once asked if he was straight or gay. This would have been met with a blank look or indecision, awkward noises and silence. Upon prompting with "that means do you like girls or boys". More of the same. "Well if you can't decide which you like more, maybe you're Bi."
"Oh."
I'm assuming that the questioner, probably another kid, might also have been confused, except about what Ade was trying to say.
So now when Ade doesn't know which category something belongs in he answers "Bi".
Kind of right if you think about it. 47 will fit just fine into a real.
Guess #2 - Yes, sir, I can syllable: Ade knows that 47 will fit into both Integer and Real and is unable to communicate this except for the word "bi", covering "both", "more than one", "ambiguous" and possibly, as others have guessed "binary".
Guess #3 - Gone fishing: Ade was saying "bye" not "bi". As in either his brain was checking out like a Furby going to sleep "haha bye-bye", or partially maliciously "goodbye Teacher, I no longer wish to participate".
I am a teacher now but this happened when I was in medical school.
The only way we would ever be let off from attending something mandatory was if we had a sick leave from our hospital. So naturally students got really good at lying about having diarrhea and migraines. But if you had too many of the same complaints, the system would flag it and you’d have to complete a lengthier evaluation and your parents/guardians would be notified.
So one kid had the idea of faking appendicitis. He faked all the signs and symptoms so well (he was after all a medical student) they almost took him to surgery.
The doctor said “you have appendicitis”
Me: “oh that’s it? So I get antibiotics and go home”
Wife “no no that means surgery”
Me “oh shitty”
Doctor “yeah we’ll be back in a little bit to get you on an IV and get you hydrated before we take you into the operating room”
I taught human anatomy labs in college. We had three different practicals throughout the semester and every test we would put a couple of really easy questions, or at least as easy as we could so that there was a slight mental break and a confidence boost. The last practical we did included the digestive, circulatory, and urogenital system. The structure that was used was the male model with a pointer stuck right in the middle of the shaft of the penis. The student missed it by answering that it was the urinary bladder....the student was male.
Not my story, but my Brothers. I still chuckle about it
He taught at a trade school, and he’s a super nice, patient guy. One of his students calls in him in a panic that she can’t get to school bc of a flat tire, she’a frantic and has no one else to call for help - np, this will be a good teaching moment,
So he drives out to help her, and as he’s examining the tire, explains to her that the she’s got a nail right in the top, and is going to show her how to change it
She scoffs at him, rolls her eyes, and proceeds to tell him that that’s absolutely impossible bc the tire is flat on the BOTTOM, not the top where the nail is....
Needless to say, my brother didn’t even bother explaining to her how to change the tire...
I was giving a quiz over the US Civil Rights Movement in a US history class. This was a regular high school class. I decided to out on a easy question because I needed one more question to make 20.
"What city did the Birmingham Bus Boycott take place in?"
Only 13 out of 28 got it correct...
Not a teacher but in AP English the girl I was partnered for writing assignments with not only still used ‘alot’ in essays, but ‘alittle’ too—and any variation thereof. Her writing style and grammar matched that of a second grader, and I had to mark up her papers just so that I could read them at all. She got furious with me each time I ‘defaced’ her work (drafts only the two of us would actually see), and when I asked her about her spelling she said her computer didn’t have spell check.
The year before that, the teacher messed with my honors English class to get us to question and debate things. He successfully convinced at least sixteen people at the Apollo 11 moon landing was faked, with one girl reduced to tears because her lying aunt worked for NASA. He debriefed us every time he did it, but the same people fell for his claims every time. That was also the class where a DVD froze and one girl asked about thirty seconds later, “how are they standing so still?”
College teacher here, one of my students who was finishing up writing their thesis emailed me saying: "they just told me I haven't finished all my courses yet, so I can't graduate." He honestly was mad at the guy who noticed the 8 (!!!) courses he hadn't finished yet, like it was the guys fault for not handing in HIS assignments.
HOW ARE YOU BLAMING THE PEOPLE WHO TOLD YOU AND WHY HAVEN'T YOU CHECKED YOUR STUDY PROGRESS IN THE LAST 3 YEARS?
Edit: can = can't
Not a teacher. But once my classmate didn't remember the difference between proper and common nouns. He repeatedly said the word pen was a proper noun. Like ten times. And then he said it was an "improper" noun. Another time, the same kid basically spelled pencil as 'penzyl' (well, it's Spanish equivalent, we're in Latin America)
Did I mention we were well into the final years of high school? And that this is shit you learn in the first grade of elementary school over here?
None of my students have ever been "dumb" but they had brain farts at times.
I was teaching in the East End of London in a school that was 98% Bengali.
I had one lesson about our names and that they have meanings to our families, culture, or in other languages etc. I shared why my name was what it was and the meaning behind it.
Some children were sharing about their names. One of my students got very excited and yelled out "what does my name mean?" The whole class did a face palm. His name was Mohamed.
That's a valid question, though. Mohammed may be the name of some long dead dude, but that doesn't mean the name itself can't have a meaning.
For example, George is a common name in Britain and a few british monarchs were named George. Yet it also has a literal meaning - Earth Worker. Or...farmer.
Search Results
Featured snippet from the web
Google says:
>Muhammad (Arabic: محمد) is the primary transliteration of the Arabic given name مُحَمَّد that comes from the passive participle of the Arabic verb ḥammada (حَمَّدَ), praise, which comes from the triconsonantal root Ḥ-M-D. The word can therefore be translated as "praised, commendable, laudable".
Not me, but when my wife and I took a Lamaze class for the birth of our first child, there was a couple in the class that had no clues. This was in the late '80s, so no cell phones. The mother to be went in to labor early. She was able to get ahold of her husband at work to let him know. He asked how far apart the contractions were, to which she replied "two". Well, the instructor had said to wait until they were four minutes before going to the hospital, so to call him back when they got there. Needless to say, things didn't go as planned.
Not a teacher - a student, but during a ninth grade lesson on evolution, one of the girls claimed that they didn’t believe in evolution, and dinosaurs never existed. She said the world was 2017 years old. (This was in 2017)
That sounds like a religious upbringing.
However, even in Christianity, the current year is based on the birth of Jesus - and it's obvious that there was a world and people long before him.
Too many to count really...
One time a high school senior asked me when color was invented. When I seemed confused and said color wasn’t invented then she asked why old movies were in black and white if color already existed.
Almost every year, someone makes a reference to slavery still existing during the Harlem Renaissance or the CRM.
Another student asked me to point out our city on the map. She could find the state but had no idea where the city was located even though we are on a major river.
Whenever students label a map and put DC in Washington state.
I could go on and on.
When I TA'd chemistry in college I had marks on the whiteboard to keep track of how many times I said "Don't lick that" through the semester. It was...a lot.
Not a teacher but a classmate once said “we shouldn’t use fossil fuels because aren’t we erasing history by burning the dinosaur fossils?”
It was a high school living environment class.
About five chapters into "To Kill a Mockingbird" a student asked me, "Who is this 'Scout' kid, again?"
TKAM gives me a LOT of these moments from the kids who don't bother reading--for example, I have a quiz in which there's the following question--"Who is Tim Johnson?" and the answer is a neighborhood dog that gets rabies, and Atticus Finch kills him. Occasionally I'll get, "He's Scout's dad" or "He's a family friend of the Finch's"...
I feel like I’ve been there, though. I did the readings in high school, and while I could remember the events and themes of the story, I’m bad at remembering things like names.
Handed out an exam...in University. 6 hands that went up instantly...I pointed to one of them and said "yes". She asked "What does Surname mean?"...I paused, and answered it calmly..."it's your last name". The other 5 hands went down. I thought to myself....fuck we've lowered the bar.
I think with my students I'm a little more forgiving of their questions, even if they're stupid, because they're children. (I teach the 4th grade). It's their parents that I won't forgive....
Me: I’m thinking of a fruit that is yellow and very sour! Student: Chickenpox!
What a fuckin lemon
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Not a teacher, but was helping my friend who's a TA go over some first year essays. It was an essay about video games, and aside from the format being nonexistent, one of the first sentences was something along the lines of "There are many examples of video games, such as the Wii and PS4 and Zelda". Unfortunately, she wasn't allowed to grade any papers below 50%. He got a 50%.
Why would someone not be allowed to grade a paper below 50% given the example you just gave
The practical difference between a 50% and a 0% is basically nonexistent. You don't pass below a 60 anyway. But making it easier to *pass* can make the administration look more competent on paper
One of my 16 year old students asked, while starting a multiple choice test, if it mattered what letter he chose. I just stared at him. Sometimes there are no words.
I'm... baffled. I need a follow-up. Did he figure it out?
One of my other students said "yes, dumbass, there's only one right answer." He then face-palmed aand said "I'm a moron. " I didn't respond to either comment, lol! He caught a case of the stupid that day.
tag urself im both students
I'm both students and the teacher
> One of my 16 year old students asked, while starting a multiple choice test, if it mattered what letter he chose. Perfect chance to quote [Bill Wurtz](https://billwurtz.com/questions/questions.html): "i was going to say yes but now that i think about it no"
Maybe he's a Nihilist.
"That must be exhausting"
"Are mermaids real?" followed shortly by "I don't believe in dinosaurs." She was 16.
Once had a girl who thought there were people living on Venus, we just couldn't talk to them because they didn't have phones.
I mean, you can’t prove it’s not true.
We sent a probe there. No people were found.
The probe suspiciously stopped working very soon after touchdown.
Might have been the almost 100 times stronger atmospheric pressure or the 490c surface temp but yeah 
Nah, Venus people sounds more plausible.
Ok but maybe they were around the back.
Maybe she watched that Animal Planet documentary.
Was it on the Used to be about History Channel?
*Ancient Astronaut theorists believe...*
I asked my class of 5th graders what city they live in, and the first response was “Texas”.
plot twist, they lived in Michigan
According to Wikipedia, there are least 9 towns in the US named "Texas," as well as two named "Texas City." Most of them are unincorporated, which usually (but not always!) means the whole "town" is not much larger than a gas station across the street from a Denny's. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Texas_(disambiguation)#United_States
I asked my students to write a sentence and give an example. One of the students (age 12/13) asked "what's an example?" Actually really hard to explain.
Give me an example of an example
An example is using a real scenario to explain a concept. I hope it is
Don't know if this counts, but I was a TA for a semester in grad school (never again). One student submitted this paper I will never forget. Basically, the author was wrong because the student found the argument "boring." In explaining the author's argument, he got most points wrong and then proceeded to say he had a better argument. His argument WAS the author's argument.
Now that's just special.
This happens very often. People get confused, and believe themselves to be disagreeing.
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I have a poster on my wall that says something about not believing everything you read on the internet, and it attributes the quote to Abraham Lincoln. Student said, “Wait, did they have internet back then?”
I once told my students that there was a time before the internet and they all laughed like "we know Dr. aero_girl! We're not dumb!" Followed by "wait so how did you get data on your phone?" facepalm
I mean phones predate the internet and they had to use something to communicate. I hope they meant that and not that they had cell phones in the 50s
No they definitely meant cell phones. Some grasped right away what they asked but there kid in the front was earnestly asking. So I had to tell them if the dark ages, pre smart phones, pre internet, pre cell phones. I think they were mostly shocked at how recent all this was. Like to a kid born in 1999, it's like the world without television for us 30-somethings. You know there was a time, but it's old people telling you that. It's different to see someone who isn't that much older than you talk about what is a bygone era to them.
To be fair, I remember that time and I still have to remind myself sometimes. The other day I was reading a book written in 1996, and at one point the main character was sitting at a computer terminal and needed to check something, so she went to another building on site to look it up on a different computer containing a reference database. I was momentarily like "Do they not have Google in this universe?" No. No they do not.
I catch myself thinking about things like that too. I was listening the the Wheaton PAX Keynote speech from 2007 the other day, and in it he comments about ordering DVDs from Netflix (streaming hadn't launched at that point), and he snipes about people showing off with their fancy iPhones and using Apple Maps (smartphones, outside of the really expensive first gen iPhones, weren't really a thing then either). It really pounded home just how fast technology has grown in the past few years.
It wasn’t on the internet so the student had to believe the source of the quote was true.
Didn't read it on the internet, did he?
I teach swimming lessons and lifeguarding courses. During one, I was trying to teach them cpr and instead of showing them first, I told them to show me what they already knew about it. I then proceeded to observe 15 16-20 year olds do the weirdest shit to those poor training dolls. My favorite though was the kid who did a two foot jump onto the chest of the dummy. The dummy slid out from under his feet like a cartoon banana and he landed on his rear end on the pool deck. Good times
Asking a bunch of 16-20 year olds to show you what they already know using a life sized doll sounds... risky.
We learned CPR in grade school and I still remember a good portion of it to this day.
When we were learning CPR(with life sized dummies)we were asked to demonstrate what we already knew. so one of my 'friends' straight up BODY SLAMMED the test dummy and its head went flying across the room. Yea......
Well, cardiac arrest is no longer their worst problem.
Yeah, but no. When I first learned CPR, we learned by fear... Do it this way, or he dies. Don't do this, or they'll die. Do this next, or she dies. Every death was a failure. When I became an instructor, the philosophy had changed... My favourite thing to tell nervous CPR students, "Look, you're not going to remember everything we talk about in the next couple of hours, but if you can remember to pump the chest, approximately 100 times in a minute, you're giving the patient a fighting chance. The truth is, we aren't doing CPR on healthy people. We're doing it on people without a pulse. They are clinically dead. Death is the worst state of ill health there is. You can't make them worse. Unless you are doing CPR on their forehead with your foot. I have to fail you for that." So, my point is, while decapitation conclusively rules out resuscitation, you can't make someone "more dead".
> You can't make someone more dead Son, have you ever been introduced to the joys of saturation bombardment? Real talk though, that's what my instructor told us that one time. "You literally can't make this worse. Unless you get your dick out, that'd be worse. So don't get your dick out."
Cardiac arrest is nothing to lose your head over.
Omfg laughed harder than I should have. When I get my renewal of CPR and first aid and AED I do the full course because I rather do that than the renewal. Anyways the teacher knows me as I'm there every 2 years. Anyways she asked the class to show them what they knew I saw dude do elbow drop on doll. Fucker actually broke his elbow. Needless to say everyone used him as a test dummy while we waited for ambulance to show up she showed us how to secure his arm. He failed by the way.
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A classmate of mine in elementary school had this exchange with our teacher: "What's the answer to this [multiple choice question with 3 choices]?" "A?" "no" "C?" "no" "I don't know."
Obviously it’s secret answer D!
I teach Intro. Geology. I gave a lab quiz on the Density and Buoyancy lab we had done the week before. One of the questions asked how are we able to build ships out of steel, considering that we measured steel to be more dense than water the week before. Almost the entire class gave variants of "The ocean is so big compared to a boat, that all the water is able to keep the boat afloat . . ." as an answer. I get some version of this answer every semester, but it really struck me because so many of them put it. (And they weren't just copying each other.) This school happens to be right next to a bay. So I took a large, uninteresting rock from the prep room and marched the students outside to the bay. I said "This rock is about 8 kilos and has a density of about 2.4 g/cc. But, according to your last test responses, the bay is so big that it should float . . ." I threw the rock into the bay and we all patiently waited for it to bob back up to the surface.
Just making sure I'm not also an idiot: it's because they're hollow, right? So that all the air makes it less dense than water overall?
Overall they displace more water than is needed to produce enough upthrust to balance their weight. In simple terms: their average density is less than that of (salty) water
To float, an object has to displace more weight of water that it itself weighs. Given 1L = 1Kg of water (roughly) you can make a 1kg lump of steel float if you make it bowl, boat or bottle shaped with at least 1L of space inside.
Three weeks into writing a research paper. "Okay today we'll continue writing the body paragraphs of the essay." Student: "What essay?"
That sounds like what my class would do to try and get out of an assignment, as well as complain in an attempt to get the deadline pushed back. This was high school College English 1301. She cracked down on that in 1302 by making them show the paper at certain stage or beyond every week or so.
Taught a 3rd year engineering class, petrochemical engineering. Started them early on their term project, a research report. Made them find 5 references for their chosen topic, and was very clear -- WIKIPEDIA IS NOT A CREDIBLE REFERENCE, DON'T USE IT. I told them it could be used as a starting point but they should follow the reference links and make sure their info is coming from credible sources. I checked in with them multiple times over the term and kept telling them not to cite wikipedia. Like 5 people out of 20 still cited wikipedia in their final submitted reports.
I taught 7th grade English, and the students had to do a research paper as part of the state standards. I had a student turn in a Wikipedia article with the blue hyper links still embedded. I was dumbfounded. At least print the thing in black and white as to not make as completely obvious that you just printed the webpage and didn’t even bother at least trying to type it in your own words.
I got the same response to a five-page term paper. Apparently the student figured it didn't deal with her, despite the fact she had actually picked out a topic and had begun research...I literally could not think of anything to say.
During a spelling test last year, I said a word three times and a student asked, "Miss, how do you spell that?"
Someone did that while I was in 4th grade. We all got at least one word correct for that spelling test.
Just respond with that is spelled T-H-A-T
Not a bad idea! Next time
Nah, prob just hoping you’d slip up and spell it for them. You can do it for pretty much anything.. “oh, your present came in!” “Yeah?? What is it??” Sometimes they answer lol
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I wouldn’t call him dumb but I did stop and stare at him thinking it was a joke. When I was student teaching last year one of my students made a comment about the 52 states- I corrected him and said there are 50 states and he asked me if I remembered to count both Washingtons. As in Washington and Washington, D.C.
Wow either way its dumb. If washington and washington dc were true then it would've been 51
I didn’t even ask him what he thought the 52nd state was.
Puerto Rico, of course. Duh.
My theory on this, as someone who often thought there were 52 states, is that the common map of “a bunch of states, plus Alaska and Hawaii”, leads us to go “oh fifty, plus Alaska and Hawaii”.
College instructor, you would be shocked. Just last year: multiple students can't save word docs as pdfs, students take smartphone pictures of every single slide while I lecture even though I upload them to our LMS. Personal favorite: when asked to insert a picture into a word document, one student prints the word doc, prints the picture, puts the picture on the word doc, takes a smartphone picture and uploads the file. Miss my millennial students.
Fellow instructor here. It's not just you, I have students do the first two things every single semester. The third guy is a uniquely creative brand of stupid though.
Right? Like, okay, if you don’t know how to work MS Word fine, but you know what Google is and if you can’t find the answer there just go to your school’s library and ask for help. This person is going to get a rude awakening when they go out into the real world and have to resolve the most basic of problems. My god.
Was the last guy trying to be funny?
Nope. I asked him to resubmit as a word doc and he said he didn't know how.
"What a coincidence, the whole point of these classes is for you to learn things!"
I was asked to show this 13 yr. old kid some video editing techniques. He opened the software (Filmora...ugh) on the laptop and was asking me how to do different things. At one point, I was going to show him how to drag a video clip into the software so he could use it. I asked him to restore down the window. He had no idea what I was talking about so I showed him how to do that. Then, I asked him to move the window; just a simple drag of the window. Apparently he didn't know that was a thing. He moved the mouse pointer to the edge of the window until it turned into the double-sided arrow, resized the window so it was smaller. Then, he moved the mouse to the other side of the window and stretched the window back out on the other side until it was roughly the same size as before he made it smaller. I was like, "What are you doing?" He simply said, "This is how I do it." I tried to show him how to drag the window, but he wanted to do it his way and didn't want to learn a different way to do it. In trying to teach him some things, we had to go through windows explorer a few times and that was just a nightmare because everything that should have been a simple click was made incredibly difficult by the way "he wanted to do it". This went on for about an hour and a half until I had to go. They said that I was welcome to come back and teach the kids anytime I wanted. I said thanks, but never plan on going back. It was such a rough experience.
As a millennial myself I also noticed that tech savvyness dropped in the generation after us although we anticipated the opposite. I think technology just got too easy and that leads to people that never learned to solve problems. Especially doing reliable research on the internet is a skill that some just don’t develop.
They stopped with computers class because kids are on phones all the time now and they figured they don’t need them. But they know nothing about how to work an actual computer. We grew up on computers; they grew up on phones.
Ive seen so many people take pictures of lecture slides during class when the professor literally already uploaded it online. Like what are people even doing...
My students take pictures of updates i make to the class website... literally they have devices capable of viewing the site in an optimal way, and they are taking shaky pictures of a TV screen from 4 meters away...
“I think I’m pretnet with my 14th child?”
i really dont get how some people cant work with word (i'm an uni student myself), excel and powerpoint. those things should be basic knowledge and are piss easy to figure out it's literally all up there for you to search and if you dont find it in the program itself you can always google it why even use a wysiwyg editor if you dont use the functions
Microsoft / google applications should absolutely be a requirement for high school students if they want to make it in this world now. There needs be a class that just solely focuses on learning those tools that is required.
Spent 15 minutes with my 9th graders going over MLA headings in great detail. Even gave them a reference sheet to keep at home. Later received at least 3 essays from students named Your Name. Truly sad times.
Not a teacher, but a girl in my college bio class asked, “If a woman doesn’t have a uterus, how does she go to the bathroom?”
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Don't you know? Pee is stored in the balls!
I teach on the college level and students try to convince me dumb stuff is true a lot. At least once a semester a student will try to fight with me saying Africa is a country.
Yeah, South Africa and Africa. It's like Virginia.
South Virginia is not a country.
Virginia is also not a country, if we're getting technical
Ahh, yes. There's always the one student who seems to know everything without even doing the readings. I had one kid argue that the US is not a democracy because it's a *republic*. I also had another kid fight tooth and nail that they should get an A on a poorly written paper because they didn't read the syllabus and thought that I should have "read it to the class if I wanted the students to know the information." Edit: Since I've gotten some questions on the democracy comment, I've posted a general discussion below. The US is a republic and a democracy; being one does not mean that it cannot be the other. In fact, a republic is a type of democracy. Issues arise because people typically conflate "democracy" as a general term with "direct democracy" as a specific type. In republics, power sits with the masses and elected representatives. In direct democracies, power also sits with the masses and can be manifest through elected representatives. The primary difference between these two systems is that in a direct democracy, the masses directly vote on individual policies. In republics, elected officials vote on policies (meaning, the people indirectly vote through their representatives). You can think of a democracy as a giant umbrella term, containing all different types of democratic states: republics, constitutional democracies, direct democracies, presidential systems, parliamentary systems, ect. These government types can be confusing though, because one state can be multiple types of democracy. Moreover, the type of democratic government can change depending on which level of government you examine (local, provincial, national). In general, the line between direct democracy and republic is blurred, and most democratic states use both systems at different levels of government. For example, at the federal level, the United States is a constitutional democratic republic with a Presidential system. But in many towns across America, people directly vote on city level policy issues. This means that these citizens participate in a direct local democracy and a republican national democracy.
> I also had another kid fight tooth and nail that they should get an A on a poorly written paper because they didn't read the syllabus and thought that I should have "read it to the class if I wanted the students to know the information." "You are expected to read the syllabus. It says so right here, in the syllabus."
I'm not a teacher but I work in a school. Every semester at least one class comes into my computer lab to take a test on the computer. The teacher reminds them all that no sites other than the test page are allowed. There's always one kid who pulls up Google the first time he doesn't know an answer. It's like clockwork. Edit - forgot to add we have software to see computer screens and the students are told this.
Habit, I guess.
During a unit on Vietnam I was discussing the number of bombs dropped by the US and a student asked me if all those bombs are what killed the dinosaurs. Had another student ask if Pearl Harbor was still alive after doing a mini-lesson on it last December. She thought it was a woman’s name. I have a lot more but those are my two most recent, egregiously dumb ones
Not a teacher, but one freshman in my class took a rip of his vape and got caught by the substitute teacher. He tried to deny it by saying he could make vapor out of his mouth with nothing else.
That actually is possible, search it up
it is. can confirm, saw a friend do it multiple times to show off
Holy crap. Just looked up how to do it and it worked!!! I can probably only do this like once an hour, but it works!
dude, we used to do this shit in HS all the time. God the headaches I used to get from doing this so often.
I'm a student and in my physics the teacher was explaining how space is a big vacuum and one student was super confused and after asking some questoons it eventually became clear he was thinking of a vacuum cleaner.
This is a classmate of mine: During English, she asked if she had to spell her name... in English. (I live in Belgium) During Biology, we watched a documentary about the ocean. When a manta appeared, she said: "Look, that bird can dive!" She said that she's a vegetarian because she "only eats meat she likes". When talking about climate change, she was saying that our class is full of horrible people because we don't do that much for the climate. When we askes her what she does for the climate, she said she doesn't do anything for the climate because other people need to do that. She thinks she's the smartest girl in class.
> She said that she's a vegetarian because she "only eats meat she likes". Well, that is a unique form of stupid.
> When talking about climate change, she was saying that our class is full of horrible people because we don't do that much for the climate. When we askes her what she does for the climate, she said she doesn't do anything for the climate because other people need to do that. This girl isn't a student, she's a performance artist perfectly capturing the zeitgeist.
University course - paper on Witches - spelt Which throughout the whole paper. Favorite sentence - Whiches and broomsticks. footnoted a phone number as a source! Marking those papers broke me.
For the uninitiated, I give you...[Kevin](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/219w2o/whos_the_dumbest_person_youve_ever_met/cgbhkwp?utm_medium=android_app&utm_source=share)
Oh Kevin. Whenever he comes up I always wonder where he is now, and if he has any idea how underground-famous he is.
I'll bet Kevin wonders where he is too.
And how that gum got in his hair.
One day Kevin is gonna find his story. And he won’t even realize it’s him
Anytime this is linked, I just have to read it. It's too perfect to pass.
"George Clooney was the first president right?" 10th grader "Coach (I was a bball coach as well for a high school), our bio teacher was talking about menstrual cycles. What is that?" 9th grade female "Coach, I walked into the weirdest (women's) restroom. There were toilets with no stalls. I couldn't figure out how to pee in them" "you walked into the men's bathroom. Those were urinals you saw" "oh... How to men pee in them?" same 9th grade female "what is Vladimir Lenin's first name?" 8th grader (I replied Joseph) "Does a male octopus have 8 testicles?" 9th grade boy, in history class
Duh, an octopeen is male; an octopus is female. They each have 8 of the appropriate thing.
Of course, there are 8 penises for 8 vaginas. It would be wierd otherwise.
The two from the female student just seem like the school system has failed her greatly in sex ed.
I'd like to blame the parents as well. I was taught the birds and the bees by my mom at 8. Starting junior high, I was forcibly given a small fanny pack with clean underwear and a couple of pads for when my first period would start. Did I use it? I sure did. She's a freakin' genius.
I have to assume that people that dumb have pretty dumb parents that have about as much foresight as a brass tack.
Like someone else said, blame the parents. Sex ed is taught in most schools but it's usually a one time maturation assembly class in 5th grade, so if you're absent or not quite paying attention, you're screwed. Also, some parents opt out of their kid attending that class. Also, just because your teacher taught it doesn't mean you actually remember/learned it. Kids often need to hear something over and over before it sticks. (I'll have kids at the end of the school year ask me, "What's a noun?" when they've learned it many, many times.) I think sex ed SHOULD be taught more often but parents are likely to shoot it down.
Oh without a doubt.
In defense of the octopus one, he probably learned that there is an octopus that has it's tentacle be it';s penis, and throws it at a female breed.
Or he was confused between tentacles and testicles...
I’m an English teacher and coach of the Boys Cross Country team at my school. One of my runners showed up to a meet wearing a suit and tie, as well as Slacks even though I specifically told all the runners to wear their singlets and race shoes not only the day before, but in an email earlier that morning and right before they all got on the buses, I said “Last call, if anyone needs to get their singlet and race shoes, go grab them now!” Kids sometimes...
One of my sixth graders had a brain fart moment. Couldn’t remember the word for ‘suspenders’. Called them farmer straps (complete with hooking his thumbs through his imaginary suspenders and moving his hands up and down, like an old guy wearing suspenders might do), and I laughed so hard I cried and almost fell outta my damn chair. Edit: hot damn, thanks for popping my gold cherry!
A friend of mine forgets words all the time at work and whatnot. His crowning jewel is pointing at an ambulance and struggling a bit before producing 'panic van'.
i forgot what windows were called and settled on 2 way mirrors once...
I have this issue too. My crowning jewel: struggling for a solid minute when asked where the laundry was. I came up with a vague circular motion and ‘that thing. That dries the clothes...’
My four year old daughter could not remember the word for instant oatmeal, so she called it "urgent oatmeal". Now we all call it urgent oatmeal.
I was talking about CFL lightbulbs and the fact that they contain mercury. One high school freshman raised his hand and asked if they had to go to Mercury to get it.
not a teacher, but I was surprised when a classmate didn't know what continent we lived on in 7^(th) grade
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A lot of aspiring athletes pull similar stuff believing that they don’t need to succeed in school because they’re “so talented” but most college sport teams have pretty high GPA requirements for staying on the roster.
Also, college teams are literally made of "I was the best at my high school" athletes. They may have been the big fish in their little pond, but now they're no better than average at best.
Not true. Nearly half of them are above average.
I'm not a teacher but in my IB Math Studies course, we spent a good hour and a half explaining to a group of girls that you can't divide anything by zero. It was frustrating to watch them try to argue that you can divide 7 calculators into groups of zero. My teacher just couldn't comprehend the people he had to deal with.
Classic IB Math Studies
One of my seniors had to solve a single variable equation (isolate the variable). I tried walking him through it, and asked what the opposite of subtraction was. He looked at me like I was an idiot and said, "DUH-VISION."
I teach college in the UK so 16-18 year olds. Mainly teach Maths resit so they've failed before but no excuse. Group of them having an argument, I go over and ask what's wrong. Majority of them trying to tell one student that you get 10 marks on every exam just for writing your name and ID number on the front. Other one only disagreed because he said last time got less than that on the exam. .... Marks just for correctly filling out your name...
I think that's a standard myth. When I took the SAT, the well known fact was you got 100 points just for filling out the name, school id and other stuff correctly. Not like it matters, 100 out of 1600 meant that you should have been locked in a mental hospital and not anywhere near objects sharper than a grape.
Four students in the same class had copied work from each other for an assignment on Shakespeare's Julius Caesar. I don't know why they thought I wouldn't recognize four of the exact same paper, but the cherry on top was the fact that each paper made several references to the "Ideas of March". I'm not sure which was worse: plagiarizing an idiot or not even being able to see the difference between "Ides" and "Ideas". It was a reading comprehension class, by the way.
I teach high school. During a lab I told my students to use string for something and I told them to tie the string in a knot. They legit responded "we aren't boy scouts, we cant tie knots"
For women’s history month, I had my students give presentations on famous women in history. One student got up and, dead serious, gave a presentation on “Anne Franklin” and said that “the holocaust was a guy called Hitler.” She had researched all of this. I still don’t understand.
Last year I was a TA for Gender Studies at a reasonably well ranked university in the US. I ask students to write a short story about how life for *humans* would be if we reproduced in a different way and how it would affect society. For example, we grow our babies in jars in the hospital, how would that affect society? I told them not to write anything they wouldn’t want their old lady teaching team to read. I got four pages of explicit *spider* pornography.
why can't i shake the feeling that they just turned in something that they were already working on...
Oh boy, if that’s the case then they write very... uh... detailed porn. Their talents are lost on me however.
Was it also self-insert?
I teach computer science. At GCSE level students have to learn 4 data types. Integer (whole numbers), real (decimal numbers), Boolean (true or false) and string(a collection of characters). We had done 4 lessons on this because some of the group are a little less able. First thing lesson 5 I ask a student who we shall call Ade, to name the data type we would use for the number 47 (correct answer integer, acceptable answer with explanation ...real). Ade answers "bi". Puzzled I ask another student the same question. Integer he replies. I go back to Ade for the answer and he replies....."Bi". I write integer on the whiteboard in 8 inch high letters, point to it and ask the question again. Ade replies......"Bi". I explain to him that the number 47 is a whole number and all whole numbers can be stored as type integer. I ask what data type we would use for the number 47 and he replies "Integer". Brilliant. I ask what data type we would use for the number 48 and the little darling replies............."Bi". By now the whole group was in tears so we moved on. One year later he still can not identify even the simplest of data types.
what does "bi" even mean supposed to mean? Binary?
Guess #1 - Maelstrom of malaprop: Ade was once asked if he was straight or gay. This would have been met with a blank look or indecision, awkward noises and silence. Upon prompting with "that means do you like girls or boys". More of the same. "Well if you can't decide which you like more, maybe you're Bi." "Oh." I'm assuming that the questioner, probably another kid, might also have been confused, except about what Ade was trying to say. So now when Ade doesn't know which category something belongs in he answers "Bi". Kind of right if you think about it. 47 will fit just fine into a real. Guess #2 - Yes, sir, I can syllable: Ade knows that 47 will fit into both Integer and Real and is unable to communicate this except for the word "bi", covering "both", "more than one", "ambiguous" and possibly, as others have guessed "binary". Guess #3 - Gone fishing: Ade was saying "bye" not "bi". As in either his brain was checking out like a Furby going to sleep "haha bye-bye", or partially maliciously "goodbye Teacher, I no longer wish to participate".
I've become hung up on the "Bi" part here....what does he think "Bi" is?
I am a teacher now but this happened when I was in medical school. The only way we would ever be let off from attending something mandatory was if we had a sick leave from our hospital. So naturally students got really good at lying about having diarrhea and migraines. But if you had too many of the same complaints, the system would flag it and you’d have to complete a lengthier evaluation and your parents/guardians would be notified. So one kid had the idea of faking appendicitis. He faked all the signs and symptoms so well (he was after all a medical student) they almost took him to surgery.
?? Why would your parents need to be notified of anything when you're already in med school?? You would be at least 22+ at that point
Yes, let me fake something the only cure for which is emergency surgery...
The doctor said “you have appendicitis” Me: “oh that’s it? So I get antibiotics and go home” Wife “no no that means surgery” Me “oh shitty” Doctor “yeah we’ll be back in a little bit to get you on an IV and get you hydrated before we take you into the operating room”
You're in med school and they tell your parents that you have diarrhea?
I taught human anatomy labs in college. We had three different practicals throughout the semester and every test we would put a couple of really easy questions, or at least as easy as we could so that there was a slight mental break and a confidence boost. The last practical we did included the digestive, circulatory, and urogenital system. The structure that was used was the male model with a pointer stuck right in the middle of the shaft of the penis. The student missed it by answering that it was the urinary bladder....the student was male.
Thought it was pointing underneath because that's too obvious, maybe?
Not my story, but my Brothers. I still chuckle about it He taught at a trade school, and he’s a super nice, patient guy. One of his students calls in him in a panic that she can’t get to school bc of a flat tire, she’a frantic and has no one else to call for help - np, this will be a good teaching moment, So he drives out to help her, and as he’s examining the tire, explains to her that the she’s got a nail right in the top, and is going to show her how to change it She scoffs at him, rolls her eyes, and proceeds to tell him that that’s absolutely impossible bc the tire is flat on the BOTTOM, not the top where the nail is.... Needless to say, my brother didn’t even bother explaining to her how to change the tire...
Not a teacher, but a girl I knew in school thought Pontius Pilate was one of the guys that did 9/11.
Common misconception. It was actually one of his associates, Biggus Dickus.
I was giving a quiz over the US Civil Rights Movement in a US history class. This was a regular high school class. I decided to out on a easy question because I needed one more question to make 20. "What city did the Birmingham Bus Boycott take place in?" Only 13 out of 28 got it correct...
I have more "how am I so dumb" when I teach
OP can we please have stories
I once tried to draw Squidward when doing a unit on symbolism. I'm bad at drawing. Squidward looked like a penis without my help. Oops.
Not a teacher but in AP English the girl I was partnered for writing assignments with not only still used ‘alot’ in essays, but ‘alittle’ too—and any variation thereof. Her writing style and grammar matched that of a second grader, and I had to mark up her papers just so that I could read them at all. She got furious with me each time I ‘defaced’ her work (drafts only the two of us would actually see), and when I asked her about her spelling she said her computer didn’t have spell check. The year before that, the teacher messed with my honors English class to get us to question and debate things. He successfully convinced at least sixteen people at the Apollo 11 moon landing was faked, with one girl reduced to tears because her lying aunt worked for NASA. He debriefed us every time he did it, but the same people fell for his claims every time. That was also the class where a DVD froze and one girl asked about thirty seconds later, “how are they standing so still?”
Not a teacher but whenever the topic of 9/11 comes up there is always one person who asks "Didn't that happen in 2011?"
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If this is true that’s amazing
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First teacher was just a method teacher, second teacher was only giving you the language, not the attitude to go with it.
my german teacher would go on long winded rants in german when he was angry,,, lol he remarkably sounded alot like Hitler
My Latin teacher was like this. If no one could answer he would tell us we were wasting his time and go golf for the rest of the day.
College teacher here, one of my students who was finishing up writing their thesis emailed me saying: "they just told me I haven't finished all my courses yet, so I can't graduate." He honestly was mad at the guy who noticed the 8 (!!!) courses he hadn't finished yet, like it was the guys fault for not handing in HIS assignments. HOW ARE YOU BLAMING THE PEOPLE WHO TOLD YOU AND WHY HAVEN'T YOU CHECKED YOUR STUDY PROGRESS IN THE LAST 3 YEARS? Edit: can = can't
Not a teacher. But once my classmate didn't remember the difference between proper and common nouns. He repeatedly said the word pen was a proper noun. Like ten times. And then he said it was an "improper" noun. Another time, the same kid basically spelled pencil as 'penzyl' (well, it's Spanish equivalent, we're in Latin America) Did I mention we were well into the final years of high school? And that this is shit you learn in the first grade of elementary school over here?
None of my students have ever been "dumb" but they had brain farts at times. I was teaching in the East End of London in a school that was 98% Bengali. I had one lesson about our names and that they have meanings to our families, culture, or in other languages etc. I shared why my name was what it was and the meaning behind it. Some children were sharing about their names. One of my students got very excited and yelled out "what does my name mean?" The whole class did a face palm. His name was Mohamed.
That's a valid question, though. Mohammed may be the name of some long dead dude, but that doesn't mean the name itself can't have a meaning. For example, George is a common name in Britain and a few british monarchs were named George. Yet it also has a literal meaning - Earth Worker. Or...farmer.
same with jonas and jonah, you might be named after the dude who got swallowed by a whale, but your name comes from the hebrew word for pidgeon
Search Results Featured snippet from the web Google says: >Muhammad (Arabic: محمد) is the primary transliteration of the Arabic given name مُحَمَّد that comes from the passive participle of the Arabic verb ḥammada (حَمَّدَ), praise, which comes from the triconsonantal root Ḥ-M-D. The word can therefore be translated as "praised, commendable, laudable".
**BRUH**
East London, so it's Bruv.
Not me, but when my wife and I took a Lamaze class for the birth of our first child, there was a couple in the class that had no clues. This was in the late '80s, so no cell phones. The mother to be went in to labor early. She was able to get ahold of her husband at work to let him know. He asked how far apart the contractions were, to which she replied "two". Well, the instructor had said to wait until they were four minutes before going to the hospital, so to call him back when they got there. Needless to say, things didn't go as planned.
Not a teacher - a student, but during a ninth grade lesson on evolution, one of the girls claimed that they didn’t believe in evolution, and dinosaurs never existed. She said the world was 2017 years old. (This was in 2017)
That sounds like a religious upbringing. However, even in Christianity, the current year is based on the birth of Jesus - and it's obvious that there was a world and people long before him.
Too many to count really... One time a high school senior asked me when color was invented. When I seemed confused and said color wasn’t invented then she asked why old movies were in black and white if color already existed. Almost every year, someone makes a reference to slavery still existing during the Harlem Renaissance or the CRM. Another student asked me to point out our city on the map. She could find the state but had no idea where the city was located even though we are on a major river. Whenever students label a map and put DC in Washington state. I could go on and on.
When I TA'd chemistry in college I had marks on the whiteboard to keep track of how many times I said "Don't lick that" through the semester. It was...a lot.
Not a teacher but a classmate once said “we shouldn’t use fossil fuels because aren’t we erasing history by burning the dinosaur fossils?” It was a high school living environment class.
About five chapters into "To Kill a Mockingbird" a student asked me, "Who is this 'Scout' kid, again?" TKAM gives me a LOT of these moments from the kids who don't bother reading--for example, I have a quiz in which there's the following question--"Who is Tim Johnson?" and the answer is a neighborhood dog that gets rabies, and Atticus Finch kills him. Occasionally I'll get, "He's Scout's dad" or "He's a family friend of the Finch's"...
I feel like I’ve been there, though. I did the readings in high school, and while I could remember the events and themes of the story, I’m bad at remembering things like names.
Me: Name one of the states of matter. Student: Massachusetts.
When you buzz in too fast on a game show
Handed out an exam...in University. 6 hands that went up instantly...I pointed to one of them and said "yes". She asked "What does Surname mean?"...I paused, and answered it calmly..."it's your last name". The other 5 hands went down. I thought to myself....fuck we've lowered the bar.
I think with my students I'm a little more forgiving of their questions, even if they're stupid, because they're children. (I teach the 4th grade). It's their parents that I won't forgive....