Welcome back to another edition of Stuff My Students Draw. I have a mixed assortment of grammar/spelling errors, animals, and more! Enjoy.
These owls are all great in their own way. My vote goes to the owl in the middle. He clearly has wings instead of freakish looking arms like the owl on the right. He is also saying HOOT. And he is floating.
Something about the hippo on the left reminds me of Heffer from Rocko’s Modern Life. Regarding the middle hippo, if you have to label your drawing in an animal drawing competition, then you drawing isn’t good enough. Unless of course you are the third hippo and you label it with something awesome like “Hippo-Campus”. If you do that, you win instantly. On the one hand, I am sad because I never thought of the hippo/hippocampus pun before, on the other hand, I am happy because I now know of its existence.
I was all ready to come on here and make fun of these poor drawings of animals. Then I searched for pictures of wombats and kiwis and these pictures are actually pretty good. I’m impressed.
This is the Penguin-Shark family. They appear to be very cute. I decided to Google-image search “penguin-shark” and the result was the terrifying image below:
I don’t grade on spelling, but we did just finish a several week unit in which the term “isosceles” came up quite often. I was pleased that the first student spelled it almost correctly and they did get parallelogram right. The second student is the most incorrect and spelled rectangle wrong.
This is a very accurate drawing of my classroom door. The demon trapped in the door window is named Carmichael. The zombie hand does not belong to him.
I have a poster in my room of Barney Stinson (Neil Patrick Harris) saying “When I get sad I stop being sad and be awesome instead.” This was one student’s take on that. I do like that he has a suit on underneath the stone-washed overalls.
The moment during the test when you realize you have no idea what you are doing.
The picture on the left is Bmo from the cartoon Adventure Time. The drawing is fairly accurate. The picture on the right is a gross anachronism. Calculus as we refer to today (and that was on this test) did not come about until the 17th century. Cavemen existed long before this. The picture just isn’t accurate unless we have an Encino Man sort of situation going on in which case that means Brandan Fraser is around and I’m even more disgusted.
Nothing says creepy like finding a note card on the floor with the same phrase written over and over.
“No eyes Always watching.”
This is an illustration of a calculus problem we had in which someone threw a ball/stone off of a tall building. What I don’t understand is why the Sun is clearly out and yet there are several stars in the sky.
This looks like a pretty lame party actually. There is a mixture of adults and students. There is a very limited amount of macarons. There are only five glasses which tells me they are alcoholic drinks for the adults so I guess it isn’t all bad. And no student, I will not frame this nor will I keep it forever. Maybe if it was a cooler party with no students present.
If you have to ask, the answer is no.
A pretty great picture of a robot made up of quadrilaterals.
This is a picture of a student that is already planning on becoming such an ultimate cat person that they actually paint their face to look like a cat. Something about this picture terrifies me.
This student cut me real deep. I am NOT female.
In calculus we worked on a couple problems in which a farmer was building a three-sided electric fence along a river. This student was very upset with the stupidity of the problem and so on her homework she explained why she would not solve another one like it.
Believe it or not, this situation reads pretty normally on the left hand side. Then you get to the rectangular seal on the right hand side and you’re like, seriously? what the hell is that thing? Sometimes it almost scares me that I wander the halls with students who dream up rectangular seals.
I have a student who has the same initials as Harry Potter and so when she writes her name, she sometimes does it in the style of the movies.
This is one of the greatest pictures to be on my board. My name is Christopher Lawrence Haren and so they have my first name plus the element Lawrencium (which is a real element) plus a heron bird. One of the best parts of it is that the bird is balding and has a beard just like me.
This student called me out on my wording of a question on an AP Calculus exam. The answer read “None of the statements is false.” First of all, the student spelled grammar incorrectly. I don’t think this is a student who has ever lurked around comment sections of the internet but he is in for a rude awakening if he ever ventures there. Secondly, I did extensive research (AT LEAST 20-30 minutes of looking online) on whether I was correct or not. The problem is whether I should say “None of the statements are false” or “None of the statements is false”. I understand that saying “are false” sounds more correct but I don’t feel that it is. I think None is a shortened form of “not one”, a singular phrase, so I used a singular verb. After my research I concluded that both versions are correct. None is a tricky word and several sites had both “none is” and “none are” being correct. The moral of the story is don’t spell a word wrong when trying to call out someone else’s mistake.
This student received no bonus points.
Student - “Mr. Haren, did you know these letters spell out ZOMBIE?”
Me - “Really?!?! I had NO idea.”
I weep for the future sometimes.
And finally, a birthday cake I received last week from some of my former students. I have a rubik’s cube in my classroom that one of those students helped me solve last year. The cake was huge (I think three cake mixes put together) and delicious. If those students happen to find this blog, Thanks again!
Until next time folks, have a great winter!