Things I've heard in my Classroom the past few days...

Reviewing what I've written recently, I realized that I sound like a half-sane, ranting and raving, frizzy hair type of gal. I guess I kinda do have hair issues, but I'm really not all that serious all the time. Now if I see a kitten in distress - pull over, call in sick, and get out the credit card. I WILL SAVE IT. Or if think something is going to hurt my kiddos - either drop to my knees in prayer or get out a butcher knife and channel my inner psycho killer momma bear (depends on the situation of course. Haven't yet had any need to go all "Kill Bill" on anyone yet to defend my young.)

SOOO, I decided to humor and amaze you with the kind of things I hear on a daily basis in my 7th grade classroom. We've been talking about the presidential elections lately, so some extra interesting comments and questions have popped up.

1.) "Um, teacher? Every time I try to type the letter 'L' on my computer, it keeps doing a number 1 instead. I think it's broken."

me ----(after a few seconds of dumbfounded silence) "Johnny, dear, that number 1 is really a lower case 'L."

2.) "Um, teacher? Can I go to the office? I threw up in my mouth."

3.) "So why do some countries not like girls as much as boys? I mean, we can cook and clean and stuff like that."

4.) "Who is our president again? Is it Barack Obama or that Palin lady?"

5.) "My dog ate my homework."

me--- "You're kidding, right?"

Johnny --- "No, my dog ate my homework last night. And then he puked it up."

6.) In a book report I was grading, a student had written, "The main character, Matt, was lactose nonchalant."

Oh, and this is the best. It's not a quote, but a story. I have this student who I can barely keep awake in class every day. I literally have to wake him up about 10 times a day and I have to remind him to do things like get out his pencil, turn in his paper, and basically do his best to look alive. His mother claims he's been waking up at 4:00 AM to play video games... Well today he was supposed to be doing a worksheet as we were watching a video on Borneo. I noticed he wasn't working, so I told him to get out a pen and write down the answers. After that, every time I looked up, he would be studiously writing away. I started to notice that he seemed to be writing with an extremely small pencil, so I was going over to see if he needed to borrow a larger one when I noticed that HE DID NOT HAVE A PENCIL. He had been fake writing the WHOLE time. Now tell me, if you are going to go through the motions of moving a fake pencil over your paper for 45 minutes, wouldn't it makes sense to just suck it up and do it for real??