Things I Learned From My Students #1: Autumn 2009

1. It's really uncool and old-fashioned to call it a "pen-drive" rather than a "USB".
   
2. No one born after 1991 has ever heard of "2001: A Space Odyssey".
   
3. Arsene Wenger speaks nine different languages.
   
4. There's a lot of really complicated stuff going on in "Eastenders" at the moment.
   
5. Deep questions like "How do snails have sex?" are really fascinating.
   
6. Everyone likes to look at bones and formaldehyde specimens, and even the dullest class can be rescued with "Who wants to play with a skeleton?".
   
7. The word "dinosaurs" can be spelt in a gazillion different ways, none of which are the correct ones: dinosours, danosouer, dinisours, dinosauras, dinosuars, dinosaurus, dinasours, dinosauris, dinosourse.
   
8. Charles Darwin looks an awful lot like Santa Claus.
   
9. The CSI Effect should never be underestimated.
   
10. A student who says they can get hold of some human hearts for next term's dissection class should be given a wide berth after dark.
    
11. Robert Pattinson is apparently a hunk.
    
12. A lack of forward planning on the students' part ALWAYS constitutes an emergency on my part.
    
13. Something will happen every day to surprise you. Sometimes it will be a good surprise. Sometimes it won't...
    
14. Every teenager has a Hotmail address that they're really going to regret when they go to university.
    
15. The age of 29 is considered positively Jurassic (or at least it would be if any of them knew what Jurassic meant).
    
16. You will learn more about your student at parents' evening than you will ever find out from them in class.