Tuesday, January 22, 2008

students say the darndest things (part 2)

Since my last Students Say the Darndest Thing entry was so successful, and since my students continue to say crazy, silly, ridiculous things, I thought I'd do another. As always, the names have been changed, but these are all direct quotations:

JOHN CARTER (Great Gatsby analysis): "Is appearance all that meats the eye?"
Great imagery here, actually. Unintentional, but still.

PAUL HARPER (Literary Analysis): "The new couple's life is meretricious and expensive, twenty-two dollars to be exact."
1. Meretricious is one of our vocab words, so he was clearly excited to put it into a paper, proper usage be damned. 2. There is a hat in the story that cost $22. How he decided that that was the cost of their new life is unclear.

RANDY STAUB (Literary Analysis): "If he doesn't deliver a good performance, he may become self-confident and never pursue music again."
Agreed. Self-confidence has ruined many a promising musical career.

PARKER EVANS (Literary Analysis): "You could start out digging yourself a little rabbit hole and end up in the grand cannon."
He's talking about lying, obviously. What's less obvious is why you would end up in a big, outdated artillery gun.

TRAVIS KARSTEN (Persuasive Essay): "Get Rich or Try Dying."
I believe this was the less successful sequel to the movie Get Rich or Die Trying. This one ends with a bunch of poor dead people. It's sadder.

And to conclude, an unprecedented three entries from the same student. We'll call him Mark Smith:

1. "Stephen King's use of tone in this short story is fanaminal."
2. "Abraham Lincoln was miss understood big time by whites."
3. "Albert Inestine was another person who was largely misunderstood."

Fanaminal? Miss Understood? Inestine? I don't even know what to say about this. But it doesn't matter because I've got to get back to grading papers and finding more of these gems.

Later gators.

2 comments:

BP said...

Here's my question: How can you think it's miss understood once and later spell it correctly? Come on, now, use your brain!

The Ben Show said...

That POST was fananimal - geez I can't even spell that.