In This Fairly New School Year, Kids Still Say the Darnedest Things

Ever since I've been teaching, I've always taught kids who said really funny stuff, and it seems like the middle-schoolers are the ones who seem to be the most quotable. For the first time this school year, one of them said something that I wrote down, saying to myself "This has to go on the blog!" as i did so.

It started out in a fairly common thing: The kid made a mistake that many, many other kids had made in the past, including virtually every beginner who'd played this same line from the book so far this year. That prompted a typical quote from me, and a funny response from the kid:

ME: Don't worry; that's a really common mistake. If I had a dollar for every time someone had made that mistake, I could take a morning off someday.
KID (after subsequently playing the line again, and messing up someplace else): If you had a dollar for every time I made a mistake, you'd be rich!!!

(Again, maybe you had to be there, but I got a kick out of it.)

Radio daze: I was on the radio for a long time in college, but it's been a while since I was on the air--February of '05, to be precise, when I called the Charley Jones Overnight program about zero tolerance in schools (a topic that would have spawned the loudest rant in the history of this blog today if it hadn't been resolved by the time I got home; as it is, I'll probably talk about it tomorrow with a much calmer demeanor). Today, I finally got the opportunity to call in to the Ernie and Jay Midday program (I listen a lot, but rarely have time between schools to actually hear the topic, formulate my response and wait in the queue to get on the air; today, thanks to one sick kid and another with a doctor's appointment, I had time to do both). I'll save the discussion of what I called in about today for another post, but it was cool to talk with Ernie, my old Little League teammate (I identified myself as such once I got on the air), for a second and actually respond to what I'd been listening to for once.

And this is crazy: Check out the bottom of the linked post in the previous paragraph for a cool quote from James Lileks' daughter; I used that same quote just a few weeks ago in one of my college classes.