# Teaching > General Teaching >  Funny Statements from Student Papers

## The Comedian

Shall we indulge in the guilty pleasure of mockery? I think you all know what I'm talking about here: students write some unintentionally hilarious things. We tell our spouses about them. We share them with our colleagues to get a good chuckle. . . . . or, I do anyway. And maybe I'm just an insensitive barbarian. 

But perhaps we could share a few here.

So far, my typo of the year is this sentence from a paper on non-verbal communication:

_"One way that people communicate without words is via hand jesters"_.  :FRlol: 
(Ah! yes hand jesters. Those medieval finger puppets, in full costume, meant to amuse nobility. Indeed. Indeed.) 

Misuse of language:

_Casinos have literally jumped on the bandwagon._ 
(Have they now? I knew that casinos were quite capable. But jumping. . . . that's quite a feat. Do they need feet for such a feat?) :grin:

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## Lokasenna

I've done a bit of unofficial marking in my time... not had anything unintentionally hilarious, but some really barmy spelling mistakes. I remember one paper kept spelling 'solidarity' as 'sodilarity' which had me laughing... as did a fairly random reference to 'the demeese of the dinosaurs.'

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## LitNetIsGreat

Something I've noticed quite a lot is when a question asks to comment on the use of language, some students just don't get it at all. I've seen replies along the lines of "the writer has used English..." :Brickwall:

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## Lokasenna

> Something I've noticed quite a lot is when a question asks to comment on the use of language, some students just don't get it at all. I've seen replies along the lines of "the writer has used English..."


Or the "one-size-fits-all" opening gambit, which really doesn't work. I've marked several essays on, say, the depiction of death in Shakespeare, and had to endure several openings along the lines of:

"In the Renaissance, there was lots of death. As a writer of the time, Shakespeare would have been very interested in death."

It's generally at this point that I sigh and put the kettle on...

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## Petrarch's Love

> Or the "one-size-fits-all" opening gambit, which really doesn't work. I've marked several essays on, say, the depiction of death in Shakespeare, and had to endure several openings along the lines of:
> 
> "In the Renaissance, there was lots of death. As a writer of the time, Shakespeare would have been very interested in death."
> 
> It's generally at this point that I sigh and put the kettle on...


Ah, the classic "love and death" paper, cousin to the "from the beginning of time" introduction. Then you get your double header: "From the beginning of time people have died. Shakespeare wrote about death in Hamlet..."

For whatever reason, I've noticed papers on the role of women in early periods tend to get generalized and flattened in this way a lot. Students will come up with a brilliant statement like "women were subjugated in Shakespeare's time" as a thesis and then proceed to list a stream of misogynistic examples in whatever Renaissance text they are addressing to produce what I think of as the "women were subjugated, let me count the ways" paper. The funniest example I ever received of this was something very close to this:

"Women in Shakespeare's time were considered weak and inferior to men. They were shown as not being strong characters. One example of this is Lady Macbeth..."

Sometimes one isn't sure whether to laugh or cry.  :Brickwall:

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## The Comedian

> Ah, the classic "love and death" paper, cousin to the "from the beginning of time" introduction. Then you get your double header: "From the beginning of time people have died. Shakespeare wrote about death in Hamlet..."


A favorite of mine along this vein was a thesis that ran almost exactly like this:

"Emily Dickinson wrote about love, death, and nature." (Instructor's note: is it even possible to NOT write about one of these subjects?). And her proof ran something like this: She wrote about nature because she mentions birds a lot. And she writes about death because "death would not stop for me" and Love because in the poem "Wild Nights!" she describes someone she loves. 

There you go! Proof the Emily Dickinson does indeed write about love, death, and nature.

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## DanielBenoit

:FRlol:  :FRlol:  :FRlol:  Oh this thread is hilarious! Cruel, but how can you help it? Makes me feel like such a good student. Great start to my working day.

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## JuniperWoolf

I've proof-read some pretty awful lab write-ups. The funniest one was when some guy kept saying "orgasms" instead of "organisms." Another girl whose classics paper I proof-read didn't know how to use her spell check. She'd automatically click on the first word that it gave her, and she'd spell check all of the names. There were some awesomely silly things, but the only one that I can remember is that instead of saying "Menelaus," she wrote "Magnolias."

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## The Comedian

> the only one that I can remember is that instead of saying "Menelaus," she wrote "Magnolias."


Ha! I love that one. And, you know it almost makes me inspired to write a poem entitled: "Menelaus Under Magnolias". . . . now what should it be about?

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## LitNetIsGreat

There are some great examples here:
http://www.britishcouncil.org/learne...ries-exams.htm

Samples:



> Solomom had three hundred wives and seven hundred porcupines.





> Actually, Homer was not written by Homer but by another man of that name.





> Socrates was a famous Greek teacher who went around giving people advice. They killed him. Socrates died from an overdose of wedlock.After his death, his career suffered a dramatic decline.





> Eventually, the Romans conquered the Greeks. History calls people Romans because they never stayed in one place for very long.





> Another story was William Tell, who shot an arrow through an apple while standing on his son's head.





> Queen Elizabeth was the "Virgin Queen." As a queen she was a success. When she exposed herself before her troops they all shouted "hurrah."


 :FRlol:  :FRlol:

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## Taliesin

That site is hilarious!




> Johann Bach wrote a great many musical compositions and had a large number of children. In between he practiced on an old spinster which he kept up in his attic. Bach died from 1750 to the present. Bach was the most famous composer in the world and so was Handel. Handel was half German half Italian and half English. He was very large.





> During the Renaissance America began. Christopher Columbus was a great navigator who discovered America while cursing about the Atlantic. His ships were called the Nina, the Pinta, and the Santa Fe.





> The nineteenth century was a time of a great many thoughts and inventions. People stopped reproducing by hand and started reproducing by machine. The invention of the steamboat caused a network of rivers to spring up. Cyrus McCormick invented the McCormick raper, which did the work of a hundred men. Still reading? Have you no work to do?


etc

 :FRlol:

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## MGK

> And Sir Francis Drake circumcised the world with a 100 foot clipper.





> Joan of Arc was burnt to a steak





> Writing at the same time as Shakespeare was Miguel Cervantes. He wrote Donkey Hote. The next great author was John Milton. Milton wrote Paradise Lost. Then his wife died and he wrote Paradise Regained.





> The winter of 1620 was a hard one for the settlers. Many people died and many babies were born. Captain John Smith was responsible for all this.





> Beethoven wrote music even though he was deaf. He was so deaf he wrote loud music.





> Moses went up on Mount Cyanide (Sinai) to get the ten commandments


this site is a ****ing goldmine!

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## Petrarch's Love

:FRlol:  What a great site, Neely. 

This has got to be my all time favorite:



> The greatest writer of the Renaissance was William Shakespeare. He was born in the year 1564, supposedly on his birthday. He never made much money and is famous only because of his plays. He wrote tragedies, comedies, and hysterectomies, all in Islamic pentameter. Romeo and Juliet are an example of a heroic couplet. Romeo's last wish was to be laid by Juliet.


Though the takes on the classics aren't bad either:




> Julius Caesar extinguished himself on the battlefields of Gaul. The Ides of March murdered him because they thought he was going to be made king. Dying, he gasped out: "Tee hee, Brutus."


And there's just no arguing with sound logic:



> The sun never set on the British Empire because the British Empire is in the East and the sun sets in the West.


The account of American History is invaluable:



> One of the causes of the Revolutionary War was the English put tacks in their tea. Also, the colonists would send their parcels through the post without stamps. Finally the colonists won the War and no longer had to pay for taxis. Delegates from the original 13 states formed the Contented Congress. Thomas Jefferson, a Virgin, and Benjamin Franklin were two singers of the Declaration of Independence. Franklin discovered electricity by rubbing two cats backwards and declared, "A horse divided against itself cannot stand." Franklin died in 1790 and is still dead.


And around election time one can't help but wonder  :Goof: :




> Soon the Constitution of the United States was adopted to secure domestic hostility.

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## LitNetIsGreat

:FRlol:  Yes some of these are just priceless. I've not had time to read them all and I'm chuckling away at the ones people have quoted above, just what you need at the end of the day - some of these are so good you just couldn't invent them I mean the Shakespeare one:




> The greatest writer of the Renaissance was William Shakespeare. He was born in the year 1564, *supposedly on his birthday*. He never made much money and is *famous only because of his plays*. He wrote tragedies, comedies, and *hysterectomies*, all in *Islamic* pentameter. Romeo and Juliet are an example of a *heroic couplet*. Romeo's last wish was to be *laid* by Juliet.


 :FRlol:  :FRlol:  Yes, that's just class.

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## DanielBenoit

I literatley fell out of my chair! This is the funniest thread on litnet  :FRlol:  :FRlol:  :FRlol: 

This is genius.




> Gravity was invented by Issac Walton. It is chiefly noticeable in the autumn when the apples are falling off the trees.





> Beethoven wrote music even though he was deaf. He was so deaf he wrote loud music. He took long walks in the forest even when everyone was calling for him. Beethoven expired in 1827 and later died for this.

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## Paulclem

At the end of one of my Adult classes, I was saying good-bye to the learners. Ron, an old chap who had been along all year, shook my hand and said:
"Well it's been somewhere to come out of the rain."

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## The Comedian

Alright, now we're cookin'! 

Here are a few more from my vault (I've kept a Word document of these beauties for a long time).




> King used the non-violent strategy to focus the nation's attention to the evils of racism and human freedom.


Yes, indeed the evils of "human freedom" -- we need to put a stop to that post haste! 




> Another confusing thought is the facts of science


I couldn't tell if this ^ is insanely profound or. . . something else.


And, my all-time favorite argument from a student essay:




> One thing I disagree with is that all your life, people tell you "go to school, get an education, you will never regret it" So how come half the millionaire out there are either highschool drop outs or never went to college? You look at the TV sitcom "The Apprentice" the last two girls left: 1 a college graduate and the other a highschool graduate. That proves right there that you don't need book smarts to be successful.


I'm sold!

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## crystalmoonshin

> I literatley fell out of my chair! This is the funniest thread on litnet 
> 
> This is genius.


I so totally agree!  :FRlol:  :FRlol:  :FRlol:

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## Jazz_

These are great  :Biggrin: 




> I've proof-read some pretty awful lab write-ups. The funniest one was when some guy kept saying "orgasms" instead of "organisms."


This reminded me of a youtube video, where an Australian MP is addressing parliament - and he struggles with the phrase "genetically modified organisms" - instead saying "orgasms" three times  :FRlol:

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## kelby_lake

This is great  :Biggrin: 

One student wrote in their English personal statement that they admired 'Jane Austen's delightful vinegarettes'.

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## JuniperWoolf

> This reminded me of a youtube video, where an Australian MP is addressing parliament - and he struggles with the phrase "genetically modified organisms" - instead saying "orgasms" three times


It was pretty funny in the context that it was written. 
"The span of a micro-orgasms life is drastically shorter then that of a larger and more complex orgasm."

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## Jazz_

JuniperWoolf - that's much more funny  :FRlol: 

It was "Jason Wood - GM Speech" in case anyone wants to check the video (makes me proud to be Australian  :Wink: )

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## The Walker

:lol :lol :lol
neely those are great!!
made me laugh so hard! :lol

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## Nikhar

My father has two daughters...both of them are girls!

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## carleymarie

These quotes are are so funny!

I am an education student, so I haven't gotten to grade any papers. In fact, I'm going to be teaching elementary school, so there won't be a lot of paper, period. 

In learning about grading, there was one funny example of what someone wrote as an answer to a math problem that I thought I'd share.

At the end of the question there was a statement: THE PROBABILITY IS________. 

Instead of putting 1/3 (the answer) in the space, the student wrote "probably."

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## Wilde woman

This thread is hysterical!

I'll add a few of my own:

"Andrew Carnegie, a millionaire who earned a lot of money through trading steel, is not very known for his notorious means to be a number 1 steel trader in America."

And sadly, this was one of the *better*  summaries of _Julius Caesar_ in one of my classes:

"In Julius Ceasar, the roman emporor had many enemies and conspirators. However, he had one ally, his right hand man, Brutus. Brutus, later approached by Cassius, learns of a conspiracy to kill Ceasar. However, because of the doubts put into his head by Cassius, he keeps it a secret. After Ceasar's death, he realizes the huge mistake he has made and repents."

Can we say...spell-check?  :Rolleyes5:

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## MarkBastable

I suspect some of these found on the Web are, er, enhanced for effect. - not least because I've seen many of them before, in various versions, and they seem to be evolving to ever higher states of honed dumbness.

I'm reminded though of a comment written in the margin of an essay submitted by a friend of mine when he was at Cambridge. Obviously exasperated, his lecturer had scribbled,

"This isn't right. This isn't even _wrong_."

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## L.M. The Third

This is delicious!!!! What a great thread!




> It was an age of great inventions and discoveries. Gutenberg invented removable type and the Bible. Another important invention was the circulation of blood. Sir Walter Raleigh is a historical figure because he invented cigarettes and started smoking. And Sir Francis Drake circumcised the world with a 100 foot clipper.





> Abraham Lincoln became America's greatest Precedent. His mother died in infancy, and he was born in a log cabin which he built with his own hands. Abraham Lincoln freed the slaves by signing the Emasculation Proclamation.





> Nero was a cruel tyranny who would torture his subjects by playing the fiddle to them.

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## AllyFizzle

I was helping my teacher grade papers and one students opening line was "The Bronx Zoo is a world famous tourist attraction located in Brooklyn, New York." 
1. This was at a school in New York City. 
2. We had been working on these final papers for the entire semester as they counted for a major portion of our grade.
3. Not just a minor miswritten word, the entire paper talked about Brooklyn and how the Zoo effects the economy and such of the area.

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## Zhu

I'm not a teacher but I have tutored some kids and proof read essays and papers by friends. 

One of my friends' brother, a 15-year-old, asked me to proof read his 'paper' on Shakespeare. In the first paragraph he had written something like this:

Shakespeare's most famous play is of course To be or not to be. 

He also wrote Shakespeare lived in the sixties, which isn't entirely wrong but still...

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## Dodo25

We once had the task to quote relevant passages of 'Heart of Darkness' and analyze them, i.e. explain how the author uses certain themes / motives to create athmosphere, or point out irony or whatever. We were especially advised to NOT pick out examples of metaphores or similes alone because they wouldn't be 'deep' enough.

Well a classmate of mine produced some hilarious quotes and passages. One was about fish swimming next to the boat. I think it was something like 'fishes swimming like a [insert some long, straight thing]'. And his comments: 

'The [long straight thing] is long and straight, so the fishes must have swum in a very straight line indeed.' 

These quotes only happen because average students don't care at all about literature and do the homework the period before it is due, while pretending to 'listen' to chemistry or whatever it is.

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## hillwalker

I once took a class of 15-year-olds on a trip around a steelworks in Ebbw Vale in South Wales as we were studying the coal and steel industry.
A few months later in an end of term examination students were asked in one Q to name one thing Ebbw Vale was famous for. One girl wrote 'YOGHURT' (there was indeed a well-known brand of dairy product - unfortunately manufactured by *Eden Vale* rather than *Ebbw Vale*).

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## Hawkman

My friends,

Be ye not too scornful of your students! I remember quite clearly in a Geography class very deliberately writing about concubine harvesters in order to annoy my teacher, which at the age of twelve I thought a huge joke. Be warned, sometimes these howlers are acts of rebellion against teachers for whom the student has little respect.
 :Wink:

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## hack

"Chaucer was a very saucy rooster."
(aren't you tempted to give partial credit?)

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## The Comedian

Here's a new one

"One thing [Martin Luther] King fought for was peaceful protest". 

Ha!  :FRlol:

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## Tournesol

Comedian, you're a genius for thinking up this thread! 

This is my 8th year of being a high school teacher, believe me, I've read and heard a great many follies! 

I remember one quite vividly, in chatting with students on their return from summer holidays, I asked what, if any, literary material had they read. 

One girl bravely put her hand up and said, "Miss, I read 'Nothing Much to do'" 

My response, "er, don't you mean 'Much Ado About Nothing'?" 

"yeah, well, same thing Miss" was her nonchalant response. 

Needless to say, I had to contain my laughter in front of the class. 

More recent jokes:

'The floor-boards crea*s*ed under me'
'I breathed a sigh of rele*ase*'
'William Shakespeare wrote 'The Merchant of Venice in the 1950s' [instead of the 1590s]



Putting the kettle on is mild...this is me at the end of terms  :Brickwall:

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## togre

This is egg on my face. In a Shakespeare class we were discussing a play--drat! I forget it's name  :Frown:  . The portion under discussion was a midnight rendezvous. Guy A lusted after Girl B and contrived to make her owe him--forcing her(w/out physical force) to show up for the tryst against her will. Well, Girl C lusted after Guy A and so Girl B swapped with Girl C. Guy A came, did his thing and left none the wiser.

The discussion was centered on _how in the world could you not know the person to whom you were making love_?! I wanted to make the point that this wasn't a terribly protracted or romantic event--in fact it was dark and somewhat hurried. I wished to make this point by comparing the event to a bank robbery (the point of comparison being the haste). I tried to do this using turns appropriate for discussing a bank robbery.

However, describing the rendezvous as "a quick in-and-out affair" did not convey this point. The teacher, the class and I were all appalled.

In hindsight, it could have been worse--I could have called it a quick "smash and grab."

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## The Comedian

> Be ye not too scornful of your students! I remember quite clearly in a Geography class very deliberately writing about concubine harvesters in order to annoy my teacher, which at the age of twelve I thought a huge joke. Be warned, sometimes these howlers are acts of rebellion against teachers for whom the student has little respect.


Don't worry -- I mock because I love.  :Wink:

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## sethyirak_7

Reading through some papers from my father's theatre class, I came across this gem:




> People call Shakespeare the God of poetry. That is because, like God, he killed most of his characters. And God is immortal.


I personally thought it was brilliant. Especially considering the prompt was, "Why do you think Shakespeare's work survived the test of time?"

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## Writer10

I used to be a teacher myself and i know how hilarious their statements become at the end!!
Well its unintentional from their part but its totally funny for us  :Rofl:

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## logophile

I once agreed to check spelling and grammar on a friend's first coursework draft. I tried not to be mocking in my corrections but a couple provoked a bit of a giggle:

'He should not have taken victory as a gibbon.'
'The author continues in this manor.'
'At this point I will refer to sauce A'

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