I have funny students

Today was the last day of second term. I had a bunch of students begging me for particular grades so that they could continue playing their sports, and I was maybe a little fed up with it all by the end of the day (don't come to me on the LAST DAY or I might breathe fire at you). So! Today I bring you a blog post that will hopefully remind me of the happier days when I demonstrated greater patience and grace than I managed to have today.

Deep breaths.

Okay! So whenever something makes me laugh out loud, I try to take note of it. If it's something a student has written down, I usually take a picture with my phone real quick. And now I pass those phone photos to you.

One of my students turned in his test with question marks on nearly every surface:

(He did fine-not-great on that test, if anyone's wondering.)

One of them doodles amazing doodles on her every paper, and this is one of my favorites (I had lots to choose from):

(#sofancy)

One of them found ALL of the zeros:

(This is in no way what the question was asking, but at least they knew how many they should find.)

A large group of them squandered their homework time one Friday by Dutch braiding one boy's hair simply because he had straightened it that day (it's usually very curly) and NOT braiding it was apparently NOT an option. Due to a lack of elastics, they tied his braids with Scotch tape:

(Do you see the tape? I told them that was a mean trick cuz ouch, but they figured it was fine because he doesn't know about hair and tape and what better way to learn?)

One of them thought my struggling infinity sign looked like a Speedo, halted class when I tried to erase the board, and ran up to very carefully label (in cursive) the error:

(I must say that when he first circled it, I was very concerned that he might tell us all it looked like a uterus.)

I've had multiple students turn in bell ringers written on tissues. I've had one class track me down on Instagram using a clever combination of social media sites and some pretty intense stalking. And I've heard probably at least a million strange comments by now. (Naturally, none come to mind.) High schoolers, man. They are a weird bunch of nuggets.


I will share one illustration-less story from about a month ago: 

I had one student come in after lunch asking if he could go to the bathroom because his lotion had exploded in his backpack. I told him he could go when we reached homework time at the end of class, and nobody else happened to overhear that conversation. 

Class continued normally, and at the end, this student took the hall pass and his backpack to go clean up. When he returned fifteen minutes later, he stomped over to me saying, "I'm sorry, Mrs. Facer! That took way longer than I expected! It exploded all over and got on everything."

A nearby student, overhearing this complaint, interrupted, "Dude! That's disgusting! We don't need to know all the details!"

We both took a second to wonder why he was so grossed out by lotion, took another second to realize he had no idea about the lotion, and then jumped to the same conclusion he had: that the first student was loudly declaring his bathroom break saga to me and to the whole class.

I laughed until I cried.