The Secular Student Alliance Draws Closer to the $50,000 Match

Questions I’ve been asked in my geometry class:

Girl; “When people have sex, why do some guys last longer than others?”

A group of students were having a discussion which ended when they all looked at me and asked, “If you have anal sex, can you die from constipation?”

We are asked to monitor the grades of the students in our version of a homeroom. A girl had straight A’s except for child development which she was failing. I asked what was wrong in the class. She said, “That teacher’s crazy! She told us if we sleep on our bellies our breasts will sag. I sleep on my belly all the time, do my breasts look like they sag?” When I didn’t say anything for a second, she realized what she had just asked me. For next day or two she was more embarrassed than I was.

I’m suddenly terrified. I’m going into teaching high school Latin, and now fear that some stupid questions will come up when my students learn the word for a sheath (as in for a sword). Hint: it’s “vagina”. Now, my own high school Latin class plowed through that vocab lesson without so much as a chuckle, but Hemant and Mike are leading me to believe I might not get off so easy.

I have a feeling that sexual abstinence ignorance education is the cause of that.

The easy answer for any touchy question is “Google it!”

The other day my 9-year old daughter and I were discussing how you could tell reliable web sites from fake or spoof web sites. I’m proud to say she thought of the right answer before I did.

The proper response to the tampon question is, “Well, (insert male student’s name here), that’s really only relevant to women, so are you trying to tell us something about yourself?” Should end that sort of questioning pretty fast, I’d think

Alright, “Google it,” is probably more appropriate for a teacher to say to a student on many levels, but I have to admit ‘Why the heck do you want to know?’ WAS the first thing that popped into my mind!

What on earth is a “geometry”?

I would probably have answered that with the teacher equivalent of “go ask your mother”; i.e. ‘go ask the health teacher’.

Now, my own high school Latin class plowed through that vocab lesson without so much as a chuckle, but Hemant and Mike are leading me to believe I might not get off so easy.

What, was your high school latin class completely devoid of a juvenile sense of humor? When I was taking Latin in high school, we couldn’t even get past the conjugation of facere without some serious giggles.

(To those who don’t get it, the 3rd-person singular present-tense is “facit“. Typically pronounced Fahk-it. You see where this is going…) Wait, you don’t teach church Latin pronunciation, do you? Ewwww.

In all seriousness though, there’s important cultural considerations in evaluating exactly why the word for “sheath” came to refer to women’s genitals. But that might be a bit much for young high schoolers.

Did you tell your student that he couldn’t tell his asymptote from a hole in the graph?

Words in a math class that will get a snicker:
circumcenter
asymptote
apothem

My answer would have been the same as JJR’s.

I’ve taught Math, and (Re: MathMike) I had a friend/colleague who recounted mispronouncing “circumscribed” in a rather embarrassing way.

I’ve read that tampons should be included in all first aid kits because they are useful for bad bloody noses. Insert tampon up the nostril and it should help until the person gets to the hospital. If the doofus can’t figure it our from that then he’s hopeless.

First you run across a beach in a flowing white dress, then you drop the tampon in a glass of blue water.