Laugh Lines November/December 2005

Messy Foreign Relations
I am a kindergarten teacher in Titusville, Florida. One day my teammate sent two of her kindergarten students to get a custodian. As they passed through my classroom, the boys told me they needed a Canadian to mop up a spill in their room.
Lisa Horn
Rockledge, FL

To Be, or Not
One afternoon I was teaching a lesson on the "be" verbs. We were playing a game in which a student had to use the correct be verb with the subject I provided. It was one particular boy's turn and he had the subject "they." He said, "They went to the store." I told him he needed to use a be verb in the sentence. He replied, "The beaver went to the store." I guess I need to work on my pronunciation.
Heather Kardeen
Dayton, OH

And Speaking of Pronunciation…
We were studying antonyms in our second grade classroom. I would say a word and my students would answer with its antonym. I called out, "closed," and from the back of the room a student yelled, without missing a beat, "naked!"
Joanna Camero
Conover, NC

Student Driver
One day a kindergarten student came to my room and asked if she could read to me from her book (I teach third grade). I said, "Sure!" When she finished reading her story, I said, "My goodness, what a great reader you are! What am I going to teach you when you get to third grade?" She paused for a moment and flipped the pages of her tiny reader without saying a word. Finally she looked up at me and said, "Maybe you could teach me how to drive."
Carolyn Stevens
Pittsburgh, PA

Phone Home
I prepared a lesson for my third grade students in which we reviewed homophones. "Cammeron," I asked, "can you tell me what a homophone is?" He answered, "824-…"
William Ronis
Craig, CO

Keeping Options Open
In our team meeting, one of the other Language Arts teachers reported of a student who, upon returning his spelling test, said, "I didn't know how to spell some of the words so I wrote a couple versions. You can just circle the ones that are right."
Christina Fouke
Streamwood, IL

The Hang of It
I asked one of my third graders to show a new student the ropes of the classroom. The next thing I knew, she took him to the back of the room, to a clothesline where I display student work. "These are the ropes of the classroom," she explained. "If you make good artwork, the teacher will hang it here."
Chris Estabrook
Amherst, NH