Herman by Jim Unger for January 26, 2025

He’s not wrong.

Remember in THROW MAMA FROM THE TRAIN when the creative writing student wrote “100 Women I Would Like to Pork”?

When I was in school, we were always asked by the teacher to write a thousand word theme oncertain subjects… I can still remember myself counting all those words and hoping I had enough.

When I was in elementary school one day I had music class. The teacher told us to hum a song. Some of the boys in my class went, “Hum, hum, hum, hum..” The teacher did not think that was funny.

He may be taking his literature too literally.

No clapper in his belfry – only bats

Deep Inhale………….Boy.

Don’t you get it — the subject he chose to write about were the numbers, 1,2,3,4 etc up to 100 — thus the counting.

Oy

Asking for a certain number of words is better than asking for a certain number of pages, because then you get students who write one word per page

I think the subject matter is the matter.

reminds me of a friend many years ago, they were supposed to design a city layout and the benefits of your plan. He put it off til the night before (as one does), and he drew up a grid, and wrote something like “the advantage of this city lies in its simplicity”… the teacher couldn’t bring himself to give him an F… he got a D minus!

I would have bumped it up to a C simply because of his creative (even if it was lazy) thinking. Too many kids are penalized for thinking outside of a very narrow box.

It’s one thing to think that 2 + 2 = 17, but if a child follows the rules of an assignment as they were presented, they should get some credit. The teachers would very quickly learn to be more careful when giving instructions.

The kid’s going to be a mathematical genius.

Ah, reminds me of when I was in a school play, listening to “Lucy” sing “The very, very, very, very”[counting]“very end!”

I recall a friend in the lower grades who got in trouble with a substitute teacher because he was talking too loudly. She assigned him to write a 100-word paragraph on what a whisper was. He wrote, "A whisper is talking in a very, very, very [add “very” enough times to make the required 100 words] low voice."

Over half a century later, I don’t recall the substitute’s reaction or whether he got into more trouble for it.