f13.net

As some of you already know, and the rest will by the end of this sentence, I get paid to help socio-economically depressed middleschoolers learn better or somthing.  I'm not really sure what I do, but I know that I get paid once a month, so I keep going.

One of the classes just had a project due last week, one they've been working on for about a month and a half now, they're all really, really crappy, and most were thrown together in powerpoint less than 24 hours before they were due, some scribbles were added, and everything was pasted onto cardboard, or unrolled toilet paper rolls, again not sure, I don't try very hard to actually help the racist little fucks.

The project itself I do know, since I was the one who had to design it while the teacher wandered off.  It was fairly straightforward - design your own country, design a system of government, establish demographics, levels of education, and levels of employment, use lots of charts to show the different breakdowns within demographics of education levels, employment levels, level of crack addiction, etc, etc.  A daunting task indeed, designing the -perfect- country, writing your own constitution, as specific as you deemed nescessary, checks, balances, ensuring happiness -- designing utopia!

That's not what happened though, unsurprisingly, they were all spectacularly awful, but there was one nugget, a piece of corn stuck to the turd of their amassed work, that I just had to share.


I have previously been reprimanded for being "sarcastic", so I just chuckled to myself and didn't point out the wonderful irony to this young misguided youth, and then realized that this was a blessing in disguise, for it would've taken me an hour or more to get this kid to understand what irony actually is, and he would've forgotten in half that time.

Also, for a group of kids who have no problem screaming "RACIST!" if someone of a different color does *anything* they find unfavorable, the demographics sure were skewed towards one race.*

*Which is understandable, people are more comfortable in a homogenous society.

More to come, I'll have to see if I can dig up the paper a student wrote on how to "solve" the war in Iraq - unleashing Godzilla.

Petraeus move over, I think we just found our man.

P.S. kids' projects often have the potential for hilarious fail/win. When I was teaching English one of the other teachers lost his passport and decided to ask the kids to make him a new one as a way of wasting an hour while he talked to embassy people on the phone. Among these was a brilliant passport for the "Socialist Republic of Canada". Biting political commentary from a 9 year old Vietnamese kid (who had obviously only ever seen a Vietnamese passport before)

If they were 9 it would be cute, these kids are 12-14, depending on how many times they've failed and actually been held back.

It's not cute when you're addressed as "Mr. Fucking <Yournamehere>"

I'm so glad I only teach adults now.  I could be making more money teaching kids somewhere else, but it's not even close to being worth it.

Sometimes after I teach, my students buy me beer.   :awesome_for_real:   

I demand pictures of the one turned in on toilet paper.

Also, what do you expect from poor minority children in Texas?

This should definitely be an ongoing serious.  Frontpage material, perhaps?   :awesome_for_real:

:cry:

(http://img74.imageshack.us/img74/9950/cartmenezhn1.png)

How do I reach these kids?

You must cheat like Bill Belichick.

Ah, we couldn't remember the name of that movie at work the other day when South Park came up.  Thanks internets!

It is actually a pretty good movie. I liked it.  :grin:

"Mista, why people be ugly?"
"Pardon?"
"Why people be ugly!?"
"Could you phrase that in proper english for me please?"
"Uhh, Why are people ugly?"
"Do you mean ugly as an adjective or a verb?"
*brain matter exploding onto walls*

How is ugly a verb? Do you ugly someone?  Or do you get uglied?

:headscratch:

Hrm.

My grandmother used it all the time as a verb. "Don't be ugly to your sister," she'd say. Sort of synonymous with mean.

Isn't it used as an adverb then ?  :uhrr:


I also love this thread.

It's actually a predicate adjective (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Predicate_adjective#Predicative_adjective).

I LOVE GRAMMAR!  :drill:

(I did just have a preliminary job interview thingy where I had to take a grammar test. I got a callback!)

"Don't make me ugly you up."  The verbs in this sentence are make and ugly.  Similar to "Don't make me beat you up."  Simplified to present tense, "I ugly you", or "I beat you".  Rarely phrased this way except by rampaging orcs pummeling the faces of sanctimonious pretty boy paladins.

"Don't be ugly to your sister." The verbs in this sentence are do and be.  Simplified, "Do not be ugly."  In its own clause, "Be ugly."  Like "Be red." or "Be fast." Ugly is an adjective.

Mean is also an adjective.

It can be an adverb if phrased "Don't speak meanly to your sister."  Meanly modifies the verb speak and is thus an adverb.

I'm pretty sure you can't make ugly an adverb, because it would have to be conjugated as "uglily".

Sure you can.  It's called an adverbial phrase.  "He looked at her in an ugly way."  The same goes for silly (and other adjectives ending in -ly) and a few other situations.

 :uhrr:

I think this thread is making me hot and bothered.

Moar plz?

I had an entire class write 1page papers on "What is Justice?" today, I'll get the highlights scanned and hosted later tonight.

Oh fucking awesome.

I'm actually on the edge of my seat for those.  :ye_gods:

But in that sentence, ugly is modifying "way", which is a noun.  He looked at her in a way.  What kind of way?  An ugly way.

So it would still be an adjective there, wouldn't it?

(http://img148.imageshack.us/img148/7724/ifuckinlovecoloringbywhpn5.jpg)

As funny as those will be... I have to ask: exactly how reasonable are these prompts for middle-schoolers?

Asking "What is justice?" of a 6th grader and expecting anything outside of pure inanity just seems pedagogically unsound.

I apologize, I'll let you all get back to laughing at people.

I'm fairly sure I've openly admitted that I'm a bad person, but just in case you missed it - I'm a bad person.

I AM open to suggestions tho, so if theres a question you want a group of 7th and 8th graders (13 to 15) to write a 1 page paper on in 10 minutes, fire away.

That's why it's called a adverbial phrase and not just an adverb.  How did he look at her? "In an ugly way"  How did she dance?  She danced "in a silly way", because she was a silly dancer.  You're correct in that you can break it down further, because yes, ugly is modifying way, making it an adjective... but with grammar, you can almost always break it down further.   :oh_i_see:

"I would totally still hit Britney." Discuss.

"What is love?"

Then fail anyone who doesn't answer "Baby don't hurt me."

"Do you believe in fate and why?"

I was promised justice results. Where are those?

"What do you want to be when you grow up?"

"Talk about mommy and daddy."

"Boyz in the hood? Always hard?"

Finish the sentence:

Shit...

A)  ...is an obscene word.

B)  ...is my favorite word.

C)  ...just got real.

why do countries go to war?
or
what is europe?

Why do all the black kids sit together in the cafeteria?

By the way, that is a Book. (http://www.amazon.com/Black-Kids-Sitting-Together-Cafeteria/dp/0465083617/ref=pd_bbs_sr_2?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1208758931&sr=8-2) Like, a real one. As in, you can probably get away with it. See how kids answer it vs adults. In fact, now that I've said that, I actually want to see answers.

Not touching that question with a 10 foot pole Schild, although did write one a month or two ago on whether or not it should be OK for whitey to wear racist regalia if black folk can wear Malcom X garb.

They all thought Malcom X was MLK and wrote papers accordingly.

I blame the conservatives and teachers and parents and violent video games and illegal immigrants and liberals and the media and McDonalds.  Did I miss anything?

The Gays :rimshot:

GET THOSE. Yeargh.

There's one in the spotlight, he don't look right to me, get him up against the wall...

Shia, Sunni, Kurd: Modern Iraq's Ethnic Heritage

Media Bias

What Groupies Really Do

What We Plan On Doing To This Teacher

What We Plan On Doing To The Hot Chick In Class

Is this an appropriate time to cross-link to the thread about the 9 year olds who tried to murder their teacher?

what question would you ask god if you meet him?

Ooh, thats a god one rk, maybe I'll throw in a "you have one wish" for good measure.

I had them write on "Racial Profiling: A good thing, or the best thing ever?" today (I couldn't actually phrase it like that  :heartbreak:)

I've got em scanned, I'll probably get around to posting them sometime in the next 24 hours.

Also, Schild has had the "What is Justice?" for a couple days now, blame him for not posting them.

What I'd do as President. To make it more interesting tell them they need to give two answers, one representing what they would say to make sure they got elected and one saying what they would really do.

That's brilliant, and open-ended enough for all manners of hilarity!  Cmon, cloning dinosaurs!

Not posted because I have other things to worry about atm.

You made a post about how you don't have time to post.  :ye_gods:

You can't make out what half of them say without way too much work. I'm going to be transcribing them. But my computer problems seem to be gone with my new fix, so we'll see what I can do.

A vague sense of unease compels me to ask whether posting kids' homework to mock it is a great idea. 

Emphatically yes (http://www.thebestpageintheuniverse.net/c.cgi?u=irule)

(http://www.thebestpageintheuniverse.net/images/crapart2.jpg)

love the cockhouses  :awesome_for_real:

I'm sorry. I can find dozens if not thousands of examples of modern art worth thousands of dollars that is about on par or worse than this one.

(http://www.thebestpageintheuniverse.net/images/crapart1.jpg)

Also, the guy who writes that page thinks he is much funnier than he is. Lame.

Is that the greatest site in the universe? He used to be funny, but then his hilarious cynicism turned into cynical arrogance.

Yeah, we hate cynicism here.

Our site is about hilarious cynicism, though.  His site has always been about hilarious arrogance.  Go back and read his very first posts.  Complaining that Maddox has turned arrogant is like complaining that Slashdot has turned nerdy.

See, I would have thought that was backwards.  Slashdot used to be nerdy, and was much loved for it, now it's just geeky.

In the early days of slashdot if they did an article on a program you could talk about aspects of it there and get a response from the guy/gal who wrote that bit of code.  Now, everything is just dorks being dorky.

I still maintain that he didn't know how great he was until a certain point. Kinda like Jon Stewart and the Daily Show. Does anyone even watch that anymore?

Yes.  In fact, a lot of people do.

As promised, projects on "If I were to make my own country"

These are 8th graders, they are all 13-15 years old, and were given THREE WEEKS to complete these.  This was not a daily assignment that was to be done hastily, they had THREE FUCKING WEEKS!

No taks!

Holy shit this is awesome.

I want to get a fucking Magician degree.

EDIT

The country with 50% black male population has the "largest supply of bananas in the world".

No, you lie, those aren't real, can't be real.  This is just a horribly elaborate ruse to make me feel terrible.


If they are real... were they told to put race into everything and what have they got against gays?

100% real, and instructions for the graph portion were to create different population demographics, assign education levels, income levels to the education levels and show the differences.

You seriously can't make up shit that fucked up.  Our future is bleak for the youth of today.  Although technically I did see some stuff that was just as bad when I was in my high school Spanish class when we had to do a similar project...

edit: i can has splel gudz

Far Far Close Away gets my vote!  :oh_i_see:

My favorite rule is from the country of Freedome: Keep your clothes on when outdoors

Honorable mention goes to "The wizards have powers to pull you over when you beak the raw"

Holy fuck.. as bad as you think it is it's honestly worse.

I've seen better shit out of my daughter's 4th grade class.  And a more realistic understanding of money.

PHD, $20 a week!

Some of those also speak to incredibly broken homes. You can tell just from what they're focused on trying to 'fix' in their countries with some of those laws. I weep.

I admired Shanavia, that's a country that's not messing around.

Also: P!3 Ch@rts!

Yeah I do feel guilty for finding some of these hilarious.

I can't believe that someone hasn't noticed the demographics of Austavia yet.

I just assumed they meant that 75% of asians were hermaphrodites.

I just saw parts on several that referred to black people as "African Americans" which would be fine... if they were ACTUALLY IN America...

I preferred the demographics for Far Far Away.  35% teddy bears!

Holy shit, I'm crying that's so funny. Wow, I demand more. You must create a webpage dedicated to this shit.

 :awesome_for_real:

"The smartest people are whites, then asian, then hispanic"...  And the blacks aren't people at all.

I showed this to two friends who were convinced the students couldn't be older than grade four.  Juuuuust terrifying.

I think that was actually a black kid, I'd have to try to match names up to be sure.

Holy shit.

Thats worse than the stuff my students come up with. In English.

If those kids are your future, you guys are fucked.

 :awesome_for_real:

I'm not sure that kid understands that percentages go up to 100... and only to 100.

I think he might have been trying to offer percentage break downs for male/female blacks/whites/etc. in the general population, he just couldn't actually do the math and/or really consider what his chart was actually saying.

I blame his teacher.

That is some seriously messed up shit. Is your class full of homophobes? WTF are their parents teaching these kids?

Welcome to inner-city/ poor African-American culture. This is your first time through I take it?

Wow.  :ye_gods:

So much irony, humor and stark raving insanity. Way too much to poke fun at in one post.

I think your students use our library.

Does your school offer a degree in janitorial arts?