Teaching teenagers is like herding cats. A lot of the time, it seems impossible, but there is always something happening that makes it worthwhile. Lucky for me, I get a lot of those worthwhile moments. And a lot of these have resulted in great quotes from my students.
Sean is always a font of wonderful insanity. One of his best came one day when he was trying a new kind of tea I had brought in. He had a sip, looked at me and said "Tara, this tea smells like a rich hot chocolate and tastes like beautiful." A while later, during a game of Periodic Table Hangman, Sean and Rachel were sitting on chairs, side by side. Well, Rachel was sitting; Sean was sprawling, and his legs were taking up a lot of room. All of a sudden, all I heard was "You're tickling my toe with your butt!" A few weeks after that, Sean was working on a Math question in my room. He had the problem written up on the board, turned to me and said "I should make the angles sin30 and cos30 and really screw over the equation."
While Sean's comments are always funny, Teddie has had some of the best ones, completely inadvertently. For example:
About The Ring:
"Is that the one where the TV takes a leak?"
When she was instructing another student:
"Look at be being all smart and like!"
On how she learns:
"I learn like I paint a fence: Its kind of random and sporadic, but it all gets done eventually!"
Life Lesson: Even though something may be challenging, there is always something that makes it worthwhile.
Friday, February 24, 2012
Friday, February 3, 2012
The Injured Wrist Assumption
About a week ago, I burnt my wrist while making a cup of tea. A foolish accident, really. I was reaching to unplug the kettle and my wrist ended up getting hit with a jet of steam. I tried to do the first-aid thing myself, but when the injury is on your dominant hand, it's not the easiest thing to do. I ended up calling my friend, Claudina. who was was kind enough to come over and help me wrap my wrist up.
Freshly bandaged, I headed off for dance class, where I was greeted with a chorus of "What happened?", "Are you alright", and, most commonly, "Is that a baking injury?" Now, I know that I bake a lot. And I know that the people in my dance class often benefited from that baking. So I guess I shouldn't have been surprised that that is the first thing people thought of when they saw my injury.
The only person who didn't immediately assume it was a baking injury was one of my dance instructors, David. Just so you understand his comment, you need to know that the previous evening, I had arrived at dance a bit early, and, having been crocheting a hat on the train on the way to dance, I took it out and continued to work on it. David saw me doing this and asked me a few things about what I was doing, and that was that. So, when he saw my bandaged wrist he asked "Is that a knitting injury?". Okay, I get that a lot of people confuse knitting and crocheting, and had I actually been knitting there is a remote possibility that I could have accidentally stabbed my wrist with a particularly sharp knitting needle. But, given that I was crocheting and the chances of injuring one's self with a crochet hook are virtually nonexistent, the next words out of my mouth were "What do you think this is, yarn burn?"
Life Lesson: People will always make assumptions about a situation based on what little they know about you.
Freshly bandaged, I headed off for dance class, where I was greeted with a chorus of "What happened?", "Are you alright", and, most commonly, "Is that a baking injury?" Now, I know that I bake a lot. And I know that the people in my dance class often benefited from that baking. So I guess I shouldn't have been surprised that that is the first thing people thought of when they saw my injury.
The only person who didn't immediately assume it was a baking injury was one of my dance instructors, David. Just so you understand his comment, you need to know that the previous evening, I had arrived at dance a bit early, and, having been crocheting a hat on the train on the way to dance, I took it out and continued to work on it. David saw me doing this and asked me a few things about what I was doing, and that was that. So, when he saw my bandaged wrist he asked "Is that a knitting injury?". Okay, I get that a lot of people confuse knitting and crocheting, and had I actually been knitting there is a remote possibility that I could have accidentally stabbed my wrist with a particularly sharp knitting needle. But, given that I was crocheting and the chances of injuring one's self with a crochet hook are virtually nonexistent, the next words out of my mouth were "What do you think this is, yarn burn?"
Life Lesson: People will always make assumptions about a situation based on what little they know about you.
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