The Learning Curve
As President Obama told students in his back-to-school speech today, diversity is what makes life precious and wonderful.
I think this is especially true in the classroom, where the unique students you work with every day make working in education so wonderful. For example, my sister-in-law just started her first year as a fourth-grade teacher. Amidst the stresses of lesson plans and getting acclimated to a new school and career, she found a moment of comic relief when a student commented that she “looked like she was ready for picture day every day!”
So in honor of all those unique students out there, we’re hosting a giveaway and awarding a $25 gift card to the store of your chioce to the commenter with the best, zaniest, most hilarious story of working in education. To get inspired, check out a presentation of our favorite comics from The Learning Curve below. Each month, our writers and artists reflect on unique, ironic, and humorous classroom scenarios to create this comic strip. And every month, we share the comic with our customers in a monthly newsletter. But this month, we want to hear from you.
What charming, quirky, or humorous moments have you had in education? We want to hear them! Post your story in the comments below. Next week, we’ll award a $25 dollar gift card to the author of our favorite story. Enter as many times as you like — entries may be featured in future Learning Curve comics! (With your permission, of course.)
This didn’t actually happen to me, but I remember that in fourth grade my brother got in trouble for using the sign language skills he had learned in class to cheat on a spelling test with a friend.
Not sure if it was funny to the teacher, but I thought the irony was pretty great.
I have never been a teacher, but I used to walk to my Elementary school and would often arrive a few minutes late because I had difficulty waking up on time.
My poor teacher tried to incentivize me to arrive on time by telling me she would start keeping me after class one minute for every minute I showed up late. I misinterpreted the punishment, thinking she was offering me an adaptive schedule I told her that I thought that would work well because I was more of an afternoon person than a morning person.
To a fellow afternoon person, that’s pretty funny.
Thanks for sharing!
On a particularly slow day in first grade, I decided it was up to me to impress Kelsi and maintain my funny guy status. What I remember about little miss Kelsi is that she had brown eyes and brown hair, and that her desk was directly behind my chair. –Maybe my first shot at love.
I went with the exaggerated “tired” routine and stretched my arms out wide. With the obvious fake yawn, I rested my head squarely on her desk.
Ick, what was that!?! Immediately, I had Kelsi laughing as she had been making balls made of Elmers Glue. I had located the cold, fresh, production puddle thereby earning a trip to the class sink where the teacher washed glue from my head to the delight of the entire class.
I had obviously saved the day! Even my all time favorite teacher Miss Nelson was in tears with laughter over my having taken one for the team.
What a smooth operator! haha Thanks Mark.
I have a few funny teaching stories to share, having taught preschool and second grade.
- One day in our preschool class, my co-teacher and I were talking with the kids about names. We asked the kids if any of them knew how they had gotten their names or if they had been named after anyone special. One precocious four-year-old raised her hand and said she knew.
She stood in front of the group and, with a very matter-of-fact tone, said, “My mommy says I was named after the place where I was conceived.”
Startled, we thanked her and quickly changed the subject.
The little girl’s name? Mercedes.
- I took my second graders on a field trip to a historical farm where docents dressed in period clothing and showed how things were done in the mid-1800s. One stop on our tour of the farm was a cabin where a woman was spinning wool. She showed the kids how to card wool and spin it into yarn on a spinning wheel. When she passed around some wool for my students to touch, she instructed them to use all of their senses to make observations about it.
I watched as my students stretched, sniffed, and thoroughly examined the wool. Then one of the boys said the funniest thing.
Holding the piece of wool up to his ear, he furrowed his brow and said very seriously, “I don’t hear anything!”
(At least he didn’t try to use his sense of taste, too!)
- One day during lunch, an aide told my coworker that she had just caught a small group of her second grade students trying to sneak into their classroom while she was away for lunch. When the aide asked them what they were doing, they said they were going to have a secret party. Their exact words were, “Ms. Longstaff doesn’t know it, but we are going to lock her out of the room and have a party! We are going to listen to music with swear words in it!”
Very funny! Thanks for sharing.
My younger brother came home beaming from his first day of kindergarten.
“I have a new friend!” he shouted as he walked in the door.
“That’s great,” Mom said. “What’s your new friend’s name?”
“Pants,” my brother said matter-of-factly.
“Pants,” I said. “There’s no way his name is Pants.”
“But it is!” he said.
And we could not convince him otherwise that no parent would name their child Pants.
When he came home the next day, Mom asked, “How’s Pants doing today?”
“Pants? Who’s Pants?” my brother asked.
“You know, your new friend.”
“Oh, he’s not Pants,” he said. “His name is Levi.”
Good one Shar! Thanks!
Back in 2005, as a new ESL instructor in the central valley, I often tried to be relatable to my Spanish speaking adult students. I would act out concepts like emotions, actions, the difference between giggled and laughed etc.
One day we were supposed to go over weather. When it came time to describe the temperature hot I fanned myself, pretended to wipe sweat off my brow. When this particular class still was looking confused I tried to finally think of the word in Spanish. My high school Spanish class had used ‘calor’ but I remembered more readily from popular music the word ‘caliente’ and knew from two years of high school class that it was another word for it. So I said “Caliente!”, and fanned myself. The class nodded and looked to each other with widened eyes and whispered to each other. Meanwhile, I felt great. I had finally gotten through to them!
The next day I related the story to my native Spanish/English speaking friend, who promptly told me with a shake of her head of caliente’s connotation, similar but more intense to hot’s other meaning in English. Mortified, I can only imagine what they thought of their new English teacher. From then on, I was much more careful trying to use Spanish, and taught my class what wasn’t in the textbooks—connotations.
So none of them would run into a similar situation with English.
We just got some packages in the mail from donors choose of live bugs and insects. As I started to open each box and showed the students the contents, the students were excited to see ladybugs, caterpillars, millipedes, and beetles. Then I showed them the fruitsflies and one of my students said, “oooh, fruitflies! When will they br ready to eat!” I just started laughing and thought that that was funny!
[...] experiences. They were a blast to read! Check out all the entries in the comments section of this post. The winner of the $25 gift card is Tiffanie Brown with her story of curious students on a field [...]
While working with one of the ELL students in the fourth grade, I could tell he was troubled about something so I asked him if he wanted to get something off his chest. He looked down at his shirt and replied, “No thats just from lunch”. Figurative phrases don”t translate well.