Wednesday, March 11, 2009

A Short Story about a Student

I'm usually pretty generous if a student comes to class late and wants to take a quiz even though the rest of the class is finished and ready to move on. It happens often enough, believe me.

Today, I handed a copy of the quiz to a late student and told him he'd have to go outside to complete it since the rest of the class was about to start talking about the essays that were the subject of the quiz. After he left, another student walked in late and wanted to take the quiz too. So I sent him outside as well. The second student left, answered the questions (mostly correctly, I might add), and returned to class within a couple of minutes. The first student stayed gone for more than 15 minutes. When he finally did return, I asked what had taken him so long. He told me that he had gone outside like I had told him, but he couldn't find a place to sit down because all of the benches were taken. Apparently, he thought I meant he had to go outside of the building to take his quiz, not just outside the classroom.

And all of his answers were wrong.

Sigh.

I have to keep reminding myself that the future of America is dependent upon a lot of people of that generation, not just one of them.

3 comments:

Johnny Grovemumbler said...

I'll do what I can to reverse the effects of their actions.

Me said...

You gave him points for just showing up, right?

Joe said...

I do have hope that the two of you are the true representatives of your generation. That, at least, gives me some hope.

I guess my quizzes should be more like the SATs, where you get points just for signing your name.