Smart in a Bad Way
In their best Mister Rogers voice, professors in teacher certification classes will happily tell you that "children have a natural desire to learn."
One teensy little detail that they leave out is that children don't desire to learn what we have to teach them.
The real natural desire they have is to screw things up so badly that teachers run screaming from the classroom. One way they do that is by messing with the computers so that the technology-challenged teacher thinks they are broken.
Here are the things they have done to computers in my summer school class:
*Used the function key to make it so that certain letters will type numbers instead. "Look, somethings wrong with the computer; I can't log in because the keys are all messed up."
*Activated certain keystroke combinations so that whenever the computer "sleeps" it emits a high-pitched lazer-gun sound. This always makes the whole class laugh and I am the only one allowed to make people laugh.
*Used a differenct function to make something called "sticky keys". I don't have any idea what the real purpose of this is, but they do it so that when you hit the shift key, it too makes a nasty loud beep.
*Made it so that the display is turned ninety degrees (or completely upside down) on the screen.
*Disabled something (not sure what yet) so that the computer can no longer find the educational software we are using.
*Pretend that they don't know how to plug in headphones so that all of a sudden in a quiet room whatever sound plays is audible to everyone. What they really do is pull the plug out ever-so-slightly when whatever noise they want to make comes on.
They have the amazing ability to do these things very quickly even though I have them seated in such a way that I can see them all. Of course, they NEVER have any idea how it happens and when I tell them that they did it, they act like I called them an ax murderer.
It is amazing what they can accomplish when they really want to!
2 comments:
Oh My Gosh!!! And I thought I was the only one!!
Now, UNG. Keep in mind I now work with 500 K-3 graders every week. But for 3 years, I worked with 7-12 graders.
I was going to mention the screen turned upside down. Not to mention countless downloads and installation of lovely little prank software.
But I suppose my favorite was when we had a thief among us. Many of our poor mice, were castrated!
Imagine how many times I had to rewrite and rewrite a staff wide email, alerting all to BOLO(be on the lookout) in as a professional manner as possible, for the person or persons who were stealing the poor little mouses balls!!
Ahh, kidz....
jacer
Oh yeah, they steal the mice balls in our school too. And of course they always change the background picture. We can't let students be alone in certain rooms because they can't keep their hands off of the computers.
Imagine if you could find a way to make learning how to write correctly as exciting as messsing up the computer!.
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