Thursday 10 November 2011

Things I Learned From My Students #10: Somebody's Watching Me

I haven't done one of these for a while - nearly a year in fact. The two weeks since half-term have been absolutely mad, but that at least means some more ammunition for this.


So here's what I've learned from the little sods recently:
  1. The words "turgid" and "flaccid" are hilarious.
  2. I can still just about pass for someone in their late 20s.
  3. Everything can be expressed as "bare", "sick", "peak", "long" or a combination of any of the previous.
  4. It is a matter of some concern that a woman with my qualifications should be a teacher in an FE college.
  5. We have a child's skull in our anatomy collection.
  6. I can use this fact to extract homework from the younger students.
  7. Students may think they want to be surgeons, but they recoil in horror at a horse dissection and the autopsy scene in "Contagion".
  8. Apparently a 31-year-old, married, female biology teacher needs to be told the location of the G-spot.
  9. If your physiology class contains mostly boys, then at some point each week someone will ask about masturbation.
  10. The question biology teachers are asked most frequently is "What does this rash mean?".
  11. Supposedly mature students returning to study still think it's appropriate to refer to "poo" when writing about the digestive system.
  12. If one student misses the day of the presentation, they can have an extension. If half the class misses the day of the presentation, half the class fails.
  13. It's surprisingly difficult explaining to students how a Placebo Band works.
  14. No one teaches these kids how to draw graphs at KS3 or KS4. As a result there are 18-year-olds drawing graphs in biro without a ruler on 20% of the page.
  15. Time is an illusion. Lunchtime doubly so.

1 comment:

  1. Re: 14.

    We DO teach them how to draw graphs at KS3 AND KS4. It seems that the idea of drawing things with a pencil rather than a biro, fountain pen, purple highlighter or orange felt-tipped pen is something that is difficult to install into a teenaged mind, whereas the BDC module seems to come pre-loaded.

    Add to that the insistence and persistence that many KS3&4 science and humanities teachers seem to have with regards to teaching kids how to do various types of graph and chart incorrectly (bar charts without gaps? Pie charts to compare two sets of data? Makes my blood curdle...), then you'll be a step closer to understanding our plight...

    ReplyDelete

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