I feel so bad but i’m just sitting here cackling as my bestie is sending me increasingly exasperated texts about her students’ first research paper (1 page long lol). Like. Despite having deadlines for each stage of research and writing, one kid emailed her at 7:45 pm for the final 10 pm deadline with a question about “resurch.” Multiple kids have plagiarized their papers, one of whom didn’t even bother changing the font or the color of the sections he copied and pasted. One girl just cited a fucking fanfiction story as one of her sources.
Middle schoolers are so precious, but god they can be so stupid too. Darling children lol
update: fanfiction girl may have put it in the works cited but didn’t even bother to put quotation marks in as she just copied and pasted two full pages of a fanfiction into her paper. every little additional detail i learn about these papers just gets worse lol
she sent me the link of the story she copied and pasted. it is…not good. it’s not even a good story. why did she steal it? god this entire sordid tale is so baffling. is it possible that this child has genuinely mistaken bad self-insert fanfiction for legitimate greek mythology? the world may never know
“Also, fanfiction.net is a community of modern fiction writers, and is not a credible source for your research papers.” – an actual sentence my friend just had to write to her students. i’m dying this is incredible lol
“Although the Trojan horse is something we all think is real, it’s actually classified as a myth.” oh you sweet summer child
“I used this video thing to find out what the roman house you can find out.” what does this even mean lol
god they’re such precious babies fumbling around like newborn colts and i am living
“The Trojan War Horse was built around the time the Trojan War took place.” I mean. He’s not wrong…
“
Like Gaea, Ouranos had a human form too, in his human form he was a tall buff guy, with long black hair, wearing only a loincloth… (don’t judge me, Gaea was the one who made him…)
So then they get married, bla bla bla bal bal.”
“
So they have triplets, and these kids define UGLY. Now don’t get me wrong they were as big and strong as the titans but they were so brutish and NEEDED any kind of waxing, and to top it all off each one had a huge eye in the middle of their forehead. They became the elder cyclops.Of course when Ouranos saw them he was like “Nope!” and made chains out the nights pure blackness and chained up the triplets and tossed them into the pit.”
“
So Gaea had come up with this new and brilliant idea called killing.”
“
But that is a story for another time. For now I will work on painting some of the moments for the LAVP so see ya later.My references are:“Percy Jackson and the Greek Gods” book by Rick Riordan, Goggle, Wikapedia”
Okay I honestly never anticipated this post to go beyond my immediate circle, and apparently some people have missed the point of this post. This is their first paper. They are learning and part of learning is doing things very badly before doing them well. Honestly I only wanted to share some nostalgic cute-response trigger with y’all witnessing the first adorable, fumbling baby steps into this kind of assignment, not for some of you to fucking judge them or their teacher just because their first attempts aren’t perfect. So like. God just enjoy it without being an asshole.
“In this paragraph I will be telling you the dimensions of the Colosseum in Rome.” “In this paragraph I will be talking about the features of the Colosseum.”
Not what was meant by making sure you have a strong thesis statement, but kudos to this kid who was obviously listening and trying to apply that to their paper ❤
“I am going to talk about things like Odysseus’s stops, the characters involved with his stops, and how long and far he traveled to get home. I can’t wait to show you everything that I have learned so far!”
oh my god this precious sunflower
“Nearly every town in Ancient Greek has a patron god or goddess because most gods didn’t share well.” There’s almost nothing wrong with this sentence I’m just enjoying this masterful use of understatement.
i read this entire thing nodding, going, yes, yes, this is what my students are like also. this is #relatable content.
Today one of my students threw a stuffed animal across the room and it landed directly in a plate filled with paint
And I had it narrowed down to a few kids but no one would confess so I made them all put their toys away and have five minutes of quiet time to Reflect on Their Behavior
During that five minutes of relative silence, this group of three year olds INVENTED A NEW CLASSMATE, named him, and unanimously blamed him for throwing the toy across the room
There was not a single weak link, they were all ride or die
kids have no concept of anything. i walked into my kindergarten class and one kid asked me what my name was. when i said miss jones, he said “i like that name. did you know i’m in love with you”
i asked my four year old cousin how old he thought i was going to be at my next birthday and he said 8. im 23
once i told a 6 year old that i had finished school and was doing “more school” [university] and she asked “why haven’t you found anyone to marry then”
We were at a museum and I was asking for the student discount and my nine year old cousin looks up at me with his eyes wide and says “wait you’re a STUDENT??”
I used to babysit these three kids and the eldest who was around 11 at the time was talking about how adults are boring and when I told him I was an adult he said, “That’s not true, you’re my age”
our aunt teaches and she has this story about a little girl who really was always pretty quiet in class and then on the final day of kindergarten she just up and stated ‘i’m all teached now. i don’t need to be teached anymore. i’m done of being teached.’
once when i was 19, I told my little cousin that i was 19 and she looked up at me with huge eyes and went, “Does that mean you don’t have to bring an adult with you to the pool?”
My 6 year old cousin saw me driving for the first time, looked up at him mom and said “does that mean she is married now?”
I watched my dad and my niece (3 at the time) arguing over a pair of pants and whether or not they were also a dress. My neice’s argument was that they were, in fact, also a dress because they were blue.
I asked the kids in my daycare class what they thought I should be for Halloween and this little boy goes, “ooh I know! A pickle! You’d be such a good pickle”
On the first day of class with my favorite student of all time, I said, “Are you okay? You look like you have a question.” And she looked me right in the eyes and said, tremulously,
Teaching kindergarten is like being an ambassador to beings from another planet and teaching them how to assimilate to our culture.
“No, we do not LICK water fountains. Perhaps that is acceptable on your planet, but here on earth we prefer to DRINK from water fountains.”
“Physics might be a little different on your planet, but here when you throw things they typically fall and break.”
“Grabbing people and shaking them violently is not considered a proper greeting on this planet.”
today i finally put together a “book” that one of my classes wrote together last year and felt it was necessary to bring back this classic not-at-all-prompted contribution from a then 7 year old: “I got stuck in a castle. I was in its jail. They did not feeded me all I had was a porta potty. I was in jail because I didn’t even know there were taxes there. Except I lied. I read a lot about England and I decided I did not want to pay taxes.”
please appreciate that this child was free to write about literally whatever she could imagine about herself time traveling and she wrote about being jailed for tax evasion in the middle ages
A non-exhaustive list of things first and second graders have done in my classes:
broken a glowstick over their hand and become immediately convinced that the fluid on their hand was going to kill them
proceed to come to me for the rest of the day, after the offending hand was washed and no damage found, and ask if they could do x activity with the not-really-injured hand
fallen out of a tree
kicked each other in the ribs while cartwheeling
informed me I looked like a monster when I wore black eyeliner instead of brown
wrote a rhyming ditty about me in which I got hit by a car
illustrated me before and after the aforementioned fictional car accident (smiling on the left, x’s over my eyes to the right)
cried hysterically for ten minutes upon not receiving the prompt card labeled “cat”
coined the phrase “so-and-so is feeling like the snail today,” to indicate when a peer is feeling overwhelmed and momentarily antisocial
inquired, in a very skeptical tone, if I was always smiling and always this happy
exclaimed that I am “really pretty!” under my uniform smock
collectively decided that I am the ideal human coat hanger, both in the sense that I myself am human, and as well as in the sense that tiny humans are the ones that hang themselves off of me
angry!cried for fifteen minutes straight upon hearing that “ballet” had a t in it
touched my waist when I showed her what I was wearing under my smock, and said, “wow, you aren’t fat at all.”
pointed at the cover of my Greek Mythology book, at one of the shirtless and ripped men, and asked me very skeptically if that was what Hades looked like.
Easter Camp edition!–expanding out to some older and younger kids, hot topic being Ancient Greek mythology:
asked me, for almost two hours straight, to “tell another story!” about Ancient Greek mythology, thus coming to hear about 90% of my knowledge of the Greek mythos (and unknowingly engaging in the several-thousand-year-old oral tradition)
asked me skeptically why the gods invented man, but not woman until much later (I told them that the gods have no imagination)
carried out a discussion, wrt Chronos, as to why eating your own children is bad
decided to act out the Pandora myth, namely performing Pandora opening the box, and all the little miseries that fly out of the box
proceeded to characterize the little miseries, e.g. “I’m the old-age monster. I’ve got saggy flappy muscles and lots of wrinkles!”
upon telling the version of the myth in which Pandora is heroic, for having closed the box on the last and worst misery, Foresight, thus saving humanity from knowing every bad thing that would ever happen to them, and thus becoming hopeless: one little girl insisted that this was actually awful, because “if we knew every bad thing that would happen to us, then we could just give up!”
consequently, all interested got to sit through a brief explanation of nihilism
Kimchi and Justice 