In the Light Lane
A True Seeker

I teach high school English, and when my seniors read Hermann Hesse's Siddhartha, I often put Zen koans on the board for the students to ponder. My little Zen book is loaded with classic koans such as "What is the sound of one hand clapping?"

One morning, I found a student doggedly searching the back of the book. "Are you looking for a specific koan?" I asked. "No," replied the student, "I'm looking for the answers."

Conrad Sienkiewicz
Litchfield, Connecticut

We were having lunch in the school cafeteria. One first-grade girl turned to her classmate and remarked, "If you don't eat the food on your plate, you'll turn back into a baby."

Frances Tucker
Chapel Hill, Tennessee

I supervise in-school suspensions in a secondary school, so I have the privilege of restraining behaviorally challenged adolescents from pursuing their activities. I routinely display framed quotes on my desk. A favorite stated: "What's exciting about life is that every morning offers a brand new day with un- limited possibilities. Yesterday's mistakes and regrets belong to yesterday. Today is a clean slate, a chance to start over, to do or become anything you want, a chance to go for it!"

One evening I found a small slip of paper protruding from the edge of the framed quotation, on which a student had written neatly, "If yesterday's mistakes belong to yesterday, what am I doing here today?"

Marilyn Gross
Downingtown, Pennsylvania

One day while my students were returning from physical education and transitioning into our language arts activity, a girl who doesn't particularly care for speaking in front of the class approached me with an unusual announcement.

"Mr. Barde," she said in a hoarse voice, "I don't think I can talk very loud today. I have Languagitis."

Rick Barde
Portland, Oregon

One of my geometry students returned to school after being absent on the day of a major chapter test. I set him up in the hallway with a desk and a copy of the test. Forty minutes later he marched into the room, angrily smacked the test down on my desk, and said, "I had no idea how to do numbers 17 and 18." I told him I was very sorry to hear that. As he turned and walked away, he added, "and nobody else out in the hall knew how to do them either."

Amy Davey
Westlake, Ohio

As I finished taking attendance in my second-grade class, three kindergarten children appeared in my room. Alyssa, supported by two classmates, came to tell me that her brother Kyle was absent from my class. I thanked her and asked what had kept him home from school. Her quick response: He was sick with Shrek throat.

Rose Loffredo
Wayne, New Jersey

We had been having trouble getting students to walk in the hallways quietly, so I came up with the idea that we all put ourselves on "mute" (as you do with a TV remote control) as we walk down the long hallways to lunch and other places. Coincidentally, my students had recently been studying Helen Keller. I felt confident that the students understood Ms. Keller's disabilities until I read one student's journal entry. The student wrote: "Helen Keller was born normal, but she caught a disease and became blind and deaf. She was also on mute for the rest of her life."

Lorraine Kearns
Crestline, California

As my gifted and talented fifth graders were working on a math assignment, one boy asked, "What is that potion for finding the area of a circle?" I guess in the age of Harry Potter, "potion" and "formula" are interchangeable-even in math class!

Kate Wolf
Lutherville, Maryland

In my high school interior design class, I used the word "monotonous" in a test question. A student asked what the word meant. I started to reply that it meant "lacking in variety" when she interrupted with "Oh yeah, it means being married to one person."

Nancy Cibor
Beverly Hills, Michigan

Verbal Feats
My German 1 students were beginning to feel the pressure of the end of the term. When I introduced stem-changing verbs, most of the students moaned. I knew that some of them were feeling more pressure than others when one of my best students cried out from the back of the room, "But, Herr Byrd, why haven't verbs ever done this before?"

David R. Byrd
Grand Junction, Colorado

After evaluating a cooking experience in my seventh-grade family and consumers sciences class, I assigned homework requiring students to demonstrate their math skills. On a sheet of paper, students were to double the recipe that we had used. They were reminded to include all the ingredients and to make sure that the measurements were written in a form that people could understand.

I had to laugh when I came to the work of one student. She wrote down the entire recipe twice.

Dixie Elmes
Westminster, Maryland

I attended Grandparents Day at my grandson's kindergarten class. We were doing an art project together.

Looking up at me, he said, "Grandpa, I'm just like you, except I'm smaller and a little smarter."

Bob Burke
Milton, Wisconsin

In my U.S. History class, one of my 11th graders wrote the following answer to a test question that asked for students to name the four levels of the atmosphere: "The tro-posphere, the stratosphere, the ionosphere, and Britney Spheres."

Gerald Lunderville
Long Beach, California

One morning, I was sum-moned to the office by the loudspeaker, which hangs next to the schoolhouse clock in my classroom. "Miss Mosellie," one student said, "the clock wants you."

Weda Mosellie
Phillipsburg, New Jersey