Either the kids weren't as funny this year, or I was going through some stuff, or perhaps both. Whatever the reason, there weren't as many Zen moments this school year. But that doesn't mean the ones we had still weren't gems:
This exchange....
"Do cowboys ride camels too?"
"No. Because then they'd be called camelboys."
"Camels have genders?"
"Um, yeah. There are boy camels and girl camels. Where do you think baby camels come from?"
"Wait: Does that mean cowboys ride cows?”
"Friday is for ALL the dances.”
A girl tries to flip her pencil in the air. She misses and it ends up on the floor.
A boy on the other side of the room notices and says, "You'd better practice some more if you want to be ready for that talent show.”
This exchange, between two students:
"Last year I went to a French immersion school."
"You went to a French Martian school?!”
In science I held up a graduated cylinder with a plastic base attached. I asked the kids why it was called a graduated cylinder. One boy raises his hand and says, with complete sincerity, "Because if you flip the cylinder part over, that black thing looks like one of those graduation hats.”
The room fills with screams when someone spots a spider walking across a desk. After one girl brings it out to the hallway, a boy comes up and tells me, "I had a spider stuck in my ear when I was three, Mr. Mulroy. So I'm used to them.”
We were taking surveys in class today for data collection. One girl walked around asking people this question: "Which is your favorite kind of cake: Twinkies, Cupcakes, Sno-balls, or Hobos?”
"I have a headache from writing so many numbers. Either that or it's a sinus infection.”
"Mr. Mulroy, if what we learned about the water cycle is true, then one of the snowflakes that landed on my face this morning could have been used a long time ago to wash Abraham Lincoln's shirt.”
Boy, pointing to a problem in his math journal: "These are mixed numbers."
Me: "I know."
Boy: "But they're already in simplest form."
Me: "I know. The directions say to write them as fractions."
Boy: "Oh! So we're supposed to do what it says?”
I see a kid walking back from lunch, busily licking a finger.
"What are you doing?" I ask.
"Licking the cheese dust left from my chips off my finger. This one has a lot on it."
The kid pulls the finger out and looks at it.
"Oh," she says, mildly surprised. "I guess that's a Band-Aid.”
The sound system in my classroom comes with a hand held microphone. Sometimes I'll use it to be heard over the noise level. Sometimes I'll hold it for a student so they can be heard more clearly. Sometimes I'll randomly hold it in front of a student just to see how they'll respond. Most of the time they'll just have a mildly stunned look and say "Hello."
Today I caught one girl off guard with the microphone. She smiled and said "Hello." I immediately shifted it to the boy sitting next to her -- one of the three funniest students I've ever had -- and without missing a beat, this boy leaned into the microphone and sang, "It's me.”
A girl walks in the room early in the morning and says, "I just saw a fifteen-legged spider crawling on my bedroom wall!"
One boy's response: "That wasn't a spider. Spiders only have eight legs. That was probably a monster.”
Student #1: "I'm gonna die! I'm gonna die of dehydration!"
Student #2: "So drink water."
Student #1: "That's too much work.”
The kids were working on rate problems in math. They started with the 365 days in a year.
"How many weeks are in a year?" one girl asked.
"Fifty-two," I answered. She started doing some quick division to check that, so I quickly added, "If you're being exact about it, it's fifty-two weeks and one day."
She finished her work and looked up at me. "There's an extra day?" she asked. "What day is that?"
Without missing a beat, the boy sitting next to her looked up and answered, "Wednesday."
And finally, this photo, taken during the final week of the school year. I think it sums up what goes on in that week almost too perfectly:
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