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By Cindy Reitzi
Hang around schools long enough and you’ll come across examples of teacher humor. Every profession has some version of occupational humor, depending on the comic relief required. Teachers require and dish out their fair share.
One version of comic relief floats on the Internet under the title, “The World According to Student Bloopers,” a series of unfortunate spellings and misplaced modifiers stitched into a fractured history of the world by U.S. students (grades 8 -college) compiled by a teacher named Richard Lederer.
One of my favorites, “Sir Francis Drake circumcised the world in a 100-foot clipper,” is actually an understandable error. I distinctly remember reading about Drake “circumnavigating the globe” in my grade school textbook. Likewise, “clipper” has several meanings, from a nail clipping tool to a ship. So, some errors may be understandable literal misinterpretations of language. When, as a young child, I heard that Europe was divided by an “Iron Curtain,” I pictured a metallic, riveted curtain stretched across a theater stage.
What makes these examples humorous is the evidence of misreading the text or the teacher’s instruction, the laughing part of comic relief. The crying part comes when students make it up as they go along and just slap anything down for a deadline. Sigh.
Recently, I came upon such a document by a social studies student.
“Ampsterdam”
- a high school sophomore
The first day the student presented it to me, I scanned and returned “Ampsterdam” remarking, “Amsterdam isn’t in Germany; it’s in the Netherlands.”
She shrugged, unconcerned, then handed in the same paper the next day, crossing off “Germany” for “Netherlands” in sentence #1 but ignoring the same error in #4.
Irked, I assumed that it’d be a snap to look up basic information about Amsterdam on the Internet, so I tried my own search. Turns out, accurate information was more difficult to come by than I imagined. I typed “Ampsterdam” into Google. Google asked: “Did you mean Amsterdam?” But, to confuse matters, a number of “Ampsterdam” listings preceded the real “Amsterdam” entries, some of which alluded to imaginary “Ampsterdams.” According to the online Urban Dictionary, Ampsterdam is “a magical european city in which almost nothing is illegal and all of your wildest dreams come true.” (By the way, “European” should be capitalized).
So, let’s break down the process and hypothesize how this student might have developed this interesting work of fiction using the Internet:
#1 – Location: I’m thinking she looked at a map, saw that Amsterdam was in northern Europe near Germany and assumed it was in Germany. Sentence 1, done.
#2 – Umbrellas? I hypothesized that she typed in “Ampsterdam” (or maybe “Amsterdam”) and then searched under Google Images. My hypothesis was affirmed when, sure enough, up popped a picture of umbrellas. Sentence 2, done.
#3 – This is accurate information about Amsterdam (although the grammar could be improved).
#4 – Northern Hemisphere is correct, sort of; Western Hemisphere is not.
At the risk of sounding like a fossil, I remember hunting through card catalogs and scanning books when I did research as a student. Today, students have a different challenge: sorting through millions of bits (or bytes) of data, including volumes of information whose only real value is in its sometimes humorous inaccuracies.
And that, of course, poses a whole new set of challenges for teachers.
Posted December 15, 2007