In the Light Lane
Skin Treatment

I was encouraging one of my seventh-grade students to complete the comprehension questions that followed a story. "We know two things about the character's description," I reminded him."We know that she had pierced ears. What else do we know?"

He shrugged his shoulders. "I don't know."

"Look at me," I hinted, elaborately twirling my hair around my finger. "What do you notice?"

He stared at me for a minute and then guessed, "Wrinkles?"

Cheryl Gilliland
Roanoke, Virginia

I teach preschool, and an essential part of our program is language skills. One day while on the playground, a little girl came up to me and said, "Mrs. Johnson, I fall." I felt her pain but also wanted to seize the opportunity to help her express herself correctly. "You fell?" I replied. She nodded her head, "I fall." Finally I said, "Honey, it's I fell." With evident concern she replied, "You fall too?"

Barbara Johnson
South Windsor, Connecticut

I taught elementary instructional music in South Central Los Angeles. Each year, I would take different groups of students to concerts, or have performers come to our school. Here are some gems I collected from students, taken from evaluations or letters they wrote:

• (After seeing a jazz concert) "I like jazz because it has a lot of weird sounds I never heard before."
• "I like the brass, the flu, and the clarinet."
• (After taking students to see a performance of Baroque and early classical pieces) "My favorite instrument was the popsichord."
• "The woman playing the French horn was real tite."
• "The third violin was playing real fast. I hope she didn't hurt her fingers."
• "I liked the concert because we didn't have to go to school!"

David Howells
Alhambra, California

In my lesson on fractions, I was trying to help students understand that fractional parts must be equal in size. In explaining, I drew on a childhood memory. My mother, I told the students, asked my oldest brother to dish out ice cream for the children after dinner. She set out four bowls and he dished it out.

"If any of you has an older brother, I'll bet you know what he did next," I told the students. One student replied, "He made his bowl really big." Yes, I said, "and when my mother saw what he had done, she told him that one of the other children got to pick which bowl to take. What do you think he did next?" I asked, expecting the answer that he made the portions equal. I was shocked when one boy said, "He spit on the biggest bowl!"

Diane Fischer
Rockford, Illinois

I was talking to a very "active" third grader who frequently found himself in big trouble at school. During our heart-to-heart talk, I mentioned the word "conscience." He immediately asked, "What's a conscience?" I then explained, "It's that little voice inside your head that tells you when you're doing something wrong."

Without missing a beat, he replied, "I'm so sick of that voice."

Carla Ketter
Madison, Wisconsin

I was helping the son of a fellow teacher add end punctuation to sentences in a story. He was stumped at how to punctuate, "Don't you ever do that again!"

Thinking an example might help, I offered, "Let's pretend you are a little kid playing with matches on the back porch. You accidentally set fire to the trash can. Your dad comes out and puts out the fire. Then he turns to you and says, 'Don't you ever do that again!' What goes at the end of that sentence?" Immediately, my student said, "You damn fool!"

Sharon O'Neal Wirtz
Sante Fe, New Mexico

My ninth graders were writing biographies on famous poets, listing their education, great accomplishments, family, and information on their birth and death. One of my students wrote of her poet that "he died of a weekend heart."

Kathy Gonzalez
San Jose, California

In my early days of teaching, I was amused by a couple of memorable short answers on my sixth-grade social studies tests. The first, following our study of the Roman empire, responded to a question asking for a definition of "rostrum." The answer? "It was a Roman restroom."

The second was in response to a question concerning the most famous ruler of the Middle Ages, a great conqueror who revived the political and cultural life of Europe following the fall of the Roman empire. The answer: "Charles Mange."

Karl Dorff
Mt. Vernon, Indiana

On a recent exam in my fifth-grade math class, students were asked to name the multiplication property for the number sentence: 52 x 1 = 52. One student wrote: "Dementor Property." Maybe I'm pushing them too hard?

Gina Strandlien
Granite Quarry, North Carolina

One morning a new ninth grader paused by my Spanish room and pointed to the piñatas hanging from the ceiling. "Wow, look at those piña coladas," she exclaimed to a friend.

Marjorie Rios
Livingston, Tennessee

A former French II student stopped by my classroom to chat. I asked him how his new French III class was going. "Great," he replied. "Kim is my conversation partner. I'm really good at vocabulary and she's really good at grammar. Between the two of us, we make the perfect French student!"

Kimberlee Moyer
Florissant, Missouri