Most Idiotic Thing Your Students Have Done (Not Said)

[GuyInTaiwan]

Nice one. What fuckers! The gall!

The worst thing was that they were not Junior High School Students. They were mostly adults.

Doesn't surprise me at all.

[Ducked]

I usually give students an element of choice on test papers, for example, maybe 10 short paragraph topics to choose 1(ONE) from.

This confuses them. I have a standard pre-test rant I go through, which they think is funny, but it doesn't matter how many times I go through it, or how many of my tests they've done, multiple numpties ALWAYS try and answer ALL the questions.

This one plumbed new depths though.

The test is described thus:-

Answer 1(ONE) question from 1-4, 1(ONE) question from 5-8, and 1(ONE) question from 9-12. Then do question 13.

I did my usual "do not answer ALL the questions""how many fingers am I holding up" ""how many questions should you answer?" rant.

Should be OK, I thought.

WRONG. As well as the usual answer-all-questions-badly brigade, in at least one case (havn't marked them yet), the "1(ONE) question" was interpreted as "question 1(ONE) which of course isn't a choice at all, and this question was answered 3 times!!!!

My belief is beggared.

[finley]

My belief is beggared.

This is nonsense up with which you should not put. Personally, I think I'd warn the students that if they didn't listen to the rant and follow the instructions, they'd get zero on principle. Good thing I'm not a teacher, I suppose.

Just to make sure I understand: these students are studying (and being tested in) English, or some other topic taught in English? And university students, yes? Taiwan's crème de la crème?

[Ducked]

My belief is beggared.

This is nonsense up with which you should not put. Personally, I think I'd warn the students that if they didn't listen to the rant and follow the instructions, they'd get zero on principle. Good thing I'm not a teacher, I suppose.

Just to make sure I understand: these students are studying (and being tested in) English, or some other topic taught in English? And university students, yes? Taiwan's crème de la crème?

Questions were on "The Old Man And The Sea"

I mark the first one as their "choice". Doesn't take me any longer to mark, (apart from possibly making the micro-writing pico-writing) but they gain nothing from it and waste a lot of their time.

Re "crème de la crème", private university, so no, although its supposed to be one of the better ones.

[Ducked]

A 10-way "match the word to the meaning" vocab exercise is a standard feature of my tedious tests.

I'm afraid I'll have to describe the procedure in a little detail in order to give the student stunt context.

They have a textbook-unit-derived "featured vocabulary" list of maybe 30 words, and lately I give them a prequiz where they have to match one of a list of 10 words to a meaning. Although I don't explicitly tell them so, the same 10 words appear in the main test next week, so its pretty easy for them.

The words have numbers, the meanings have letters.

This test a small group of 3 especially lazy fuckers decided they would only use one letter, so they didn't have to think and were guaranteed a hit, but only one. This is of course routine on T/F questions, and I compensate for it when I (infrequently) use them, which upsets them, possibly because no one else does.

In this 10-way context its a Fuck-You first, though arguably it doesn't qualify as idiotic.

This does though: Sometimes I add another column to the table where they have to identify the wordform, or in this case, to say whether the "meaning" is a synonym (S) exanple (E) or definition (D), as featured in the textbook.

They decided they'd do the one-letter thing for this too, and of course it is statistically a better tactic in this 3-way context.

The letter they chose for both was, sadly, (C)



But perhaps you have to have been marking all day to find that funny

[Abacus]

I don't have any great stories that I remember but here are a few:

One student particularly hated being in class and especially his new teacher (me). One day he scratched my name and Chinese profanity into the desk. The manager didn't do anything. I ended up kicking him out of class pretty much everyday and making him do a worksheet in the hallway. I wasn't going to put up with him.

Another student forgot his homework and then claimed that he completely lost his notebook. A week later his parents did parent/teacher conferences at his elementary school and found it in his desk.

A pair of young students (cousins) were outside our buxiban and started calling their other teacher waiguoren loudly multiple times to their mom directly in front of him. They had an unpleasant lashing from our manager (different manager/school than above).

here's a kind of funny one from yesterday. The students were supposed to make a sentence with take a bus. It was one of their first tests like this so I tried to help them and say that they might have to change the verb tense. They didn't change the verb tense but rather changed take a bus to take some cookies and the other changed it to on foot. I was so confused grading it until they finally explained why they did that. they were extremely embarrassed.

[ehophi]

In my first few weeks at my job, one of the asshole students took a playful swing at me. I spun him and pinned him onto his desk by his chest with one hand. Every time he would raise with that goofy smile on his face, ready for more, I would immediately pin him back onto his desk. In a minute or so, his smile turned to a frown, and he stopped trying to fight back. At that point, I let him go, and he sat in his seat.

The same kid failed every test I gave him, did little work, and eventually his mom came in to bitch about the situation. We explained that her son was a failure, especially when compared with other students, and that he was not going to get any special treatment. She took him out. When the mother visited, I wondered if it was a big deal, so asked my co-teacher. "No, don't worry about it," she responded. "We all think his mom is a bitch." Classic!

Besides that, my students would tell me for how many hours they played video games in their journals; and then, when they failed a test, tried to tell me that they had studied over all of those hours that they wrote that they spent playing video games.

[2Enigma]

I think this might be a repeat from another thread:
Junior High at private upscale school. I need to make a quick trip to the office. I get back and one of the idiot boys had used a black indelible marker to write in LARGE letters all across one wall the classroom that (one of the girls in another class) is not a virgin anymore and other very graphic details. (There's a jungle area near the English classrooms and it seems one of the boys had taken here there the previous day and took care of business.)That school has a military guard. I immediately went to get him. Class shut down and he yelled at all of them until the guilty kid got ratted on. Parents had to come from work. Ended up repainting the whole classroom and student was expelled.
EDIT: Heard later that the 2 sex partners got expelled too.
Sorry if it's a repeat.

[Ducked]

My routine on issuing test papers is to give them out face-down (i.e. blank side up) and tell them not to turn them over until I give the signal.

I do "funny" snarling at anyone who turns the paper over prematurely, as a bit of "stage business" (though if I thought they were really taking the piss I'd kick them out.)

Bit more business with the signal (palm flat, eyes darting , READY....STEADY .....wait-for-it drill sargeant stylee.......GO! - flip palm)

I usually outline the test on the blackboard before issuing the papers.

This time a girl sitting at the front didn't see/realise what the rest of the herd were doing, and didn't turn her paper over. As far as I could tell from a quick look (havn't marked them yet) she constructed her own questions based on my description of each of the three groups of questions, and then answered them on the blank back of the question paper.

Like I said, the test procedure is a (tedious) routine, and we are near the end of the semester. She'd done at least 3 before.

My belief is once again beggared.

[Chris]

I usually give students an element of choice on test papers, for example, maybe 10 short paragraph topics to choose 1(ONE) from.

This confuses them. I have a standard pre-test rant I go through, which they think is funny, but it doesn't matter how many times I go through it, or how many of my tests they've done, multiple numpties ALWAYS try and answer ALL the questions.

I see this all the time. It really is astounding.