Best of Student Comments Vol. 1

I started teaching full time in the fall of 2006, which means that I have now amassed over a decade's worth of funny anecdotes about students. These can be broken into two major categories: Funny Things Students have Said and Funny Things Students have Written. (Both of these categories can be further broken into Intentional Humor and Unintentional Humor.) For Volume One of what may end up being a recurring series, here are a few highlights from the verbal category.

Intentional Comedy

Me: [speaking to a freshman class] There is more than one way to write effectively and everyone has their own personal preferences. So English teachers always contradict each other.
Student: [under his breath, to the kid sitting next to him] Last year, my teacher told us that English teachers never contradict each other.

Me: [talking about my grad school experience at Brown] I only spent a year there. I don't really keep in touch with any of my Brown friends.
Student: Uh, Mr. Barron. I think they prefer to be called African American.

Unintentional Comedy

Me: Don't forget - your paper is due at noon tomorrow.
Student: You mean noon as in, like, midnight noon?
Me: ... That's not a thing.

(Note to self: Midnight Noon has band name potential.)

Student: Hey Mr. Barron, I know you're Jewish and everything, but did you hear we have a new pope?

(Fair point. We do have our own Jewish newspapers and cable news outlets that don't report on that stuff.)

Student: Mr. Barron, what year were you born?
Me: 1982. Why?
Student: [disappointed] Oh. I had a question about the fifties...

(I mean, I know kids have no real concept of age. But given that I couldn't have been older than 27 at the time, could anyone - even a fourteen-year-old kid - have reasonably mistaken me for sixty-something?)

Me: Has anyone ever heard of a famous book called The Sound and the Fury?
[thirty seconds of crickets]
Student: [with a surfer/stoner inflection] I've seen The Fast and the Furious!

(In retrospect, that one's on me. Was I really expecting that this reference would mean anything to a junior remedial class?)

More to come...

PS - Rolling Stone apparently wrote their own rules of concert etiquette a few years ago, and some of them are very similar to mine. They even include a bit about "Freebird." Good to know I'm not alone.