One of the activities I liked to do with my high school kids was having Q&A or Tell-Me-About-Yourself sessions. It took the kids most of the first semester to feel comfortable enough to talk in detail about their lives outside of school.
Once they opened up, quite a few of their responses have been pretty funny:
“My mother’s favorite words are ‘I told you!’ and ‘It’s time for you to do homework!’ My father’s favorite words are ‘What are we having for dinner tomorrow night?'”
“My favorite activities are thinking about myself and looking in the mirror.”
Some of the stories were not so funny:
Student: “When I was younger one day I fell into a hole.”
Me: [Laughing] “Well, what happened? What did you do while you were in the hole?”
Student: [Serious] “I sat and thought about my life.”
Me: [Still laughing]
Student: “The found me after eight hours.”
Me: [Suddenly not laughing]
It tuns out that she had fallen into a three meter deep pit in the sidewalk. It’s not uncommon to come across unmarked, hand dug, goddamn deep holes. Holes that are left unfilled pretty quickly get filled with trash from apartments. The hole my student fell into was being dug for sewer line repairs–the workers had taken off for the day leaving their excavation unmarked. She sat in the dark for a third of a day with busted sewer pipes to keep her company.
One of my students told me a story about falling off her bike when she rode it over an unmarked hole. Fortunately someone saw the abandoned bike beside the top of the hole and pulled her out a little while later. Her classmates all thought it was really funny and absent-minded but I was horrified that she’d gotten hurt through someone’s negligance. That’s a lawsuit in the US!
This is just a great post, Luke. The range or responses is quite interesting. If you get any more this good be sure to post.
Meg–Yeah, you know the other day I ran over to an uncovered manhole that had a bike over it…I was afraid the rider had fallen down the hole. Turns out the bike was there in lieu of a cover.
Or it could have been a pit trap for bike thieves.
A-gu–More are coming.