Kids Say the Funniest Things

I dearly love to laugh. And honestly, on the occasion I can't really take everything seriously. Even if a student has a wrong answer to a question they should know, the wrong answer can be hilarious. (I hope I won't get in trouble for saying that in relation to teaching, but sometimes one of my students will say something, and I will have to turn around and laugh silently and shortly while writing on the board, or smooth out the smile that quickly spreads across my face.)

Here is where it gets real. While laughter is good, I fully realize that laughing at someone can be very damaging. May I even say that we can all remember a time that someone laughed at us when we were trying our hardest and were very hurt by the laughter? However, laughing while learning is essential, and encouraging students to take ownership of their language and use it as much as possible is one of my goals. Encouraging laughter in a general sense can help create a safe environment where the student can be encouraged to learn from their mistakes, and even eventually, laugh with their adventures in language and content.

Here are some of the funniest moments so far:

--I showed a picture of a bowl of oatmeal. Me: "Can you tell me what this is?"  student-"A meal nobody likes!"

--We were working on synonyms, and a student wanted to know how to use the word afraid in a sentence. My quick example was "I'm so afraid of tigers". As a quick afterthought I said, "That's just an example you know. I'm not actually afraid of them". Immediately, the student emphatically exclaimed, "I AAAM!". Another student walking by quipped, "but we're supposed to be afraid of all dangerous animals!". I affirmed this to both students.

Silly Miss Rachel. I let my own ego get in the way of teaching. It is okay, and natural to have a fear of dangerous animals. Thank you for humbling me a little, 3rd graders.

--I showed a picture of an owl. Student response: "When him see a zombie, him fly away! *flaps arms and runs off...*" Not only has the consistent use of the pronoun"him" instead of "he" started to make me laugh, but the zombie reference was so irrelevant to anything we had learned.

--I pointed to a picture of a giraffe. "Can you tell me what animal this is?" Student response: "A MONGOOSE!". How did that word get in their vocabulary?

-- Kindergarten Student A: "ouch!" Kindergarten Student B's instant response: "What's happening girrrlfrraaaaaind??"

Coming from a 5 year old English Language Learner's mouth, this was hilarious.




Again, while many of these quotes are funny, especially in context, it is important for me to realize the real people I teach.The students are real people, not just robots who I have to teach. They too have their own lives, feelings, families, emotions, loves, and struggles. Listening to what they're saying when they're not giving me an answer to the hundreds of questions I ask per day can help give me insight into their personalities and lives.



I too, am a student. I too, am learning, and am learning to laugh at the mistakes I make while teaching. =)

StrengthsFinder 2.0

At first, I was happy to take the StrengthsFinder 2.0 inventory. Most Nyack College undergrads take this bestselling strengths inventory their freshman year. I am in honors, so I didn't have to take it. Until student teaching...

So according to this inventory, my strengths are: 

 

Input

Connectedness

Intellection

Ideation

Adaptability

 

I find that  these are good representations of some of my strengths. Nothing really surprised me. However, my results guide warned me that my results may not be as accurate as they could have been because I picked in the middle ("neutral")  for almost everything. (This is where I start talking about how much I disliked taking the test.) I only had 20 seconds to answer each question. That made me anxious and didn't help at all for the questions I could not decide on.

Some of the questions absolutely baffled me, because to me the two options, of which I was supposed to pick one, were one and the same. Often both were immediately instinctive to me. Ex. I often: 1. Encourage others. 2. Strengthen others. For me there is no difference. So I had hoped that by picking the neutral option (between the extremes), that I was telling the computer who I really am. It didn't get it. So while I feel my results were accurate, I wonder what they would have been if my true answers were taken into consideration. I would much rather sit down with a counselor or verbal test administrator and do this inventory a different way.