Q and A

School becomes little more than a practiced routine of information ingestion and digestion, so finding fun in learning becomes challenging for individuals who get bored with worksheets and obvious answers to simply asked questions.

Finding fun can come from being with friends, or learning about some cool new engineering innovation, or even from the joke of the day. There are ways to sneak fun into those pesky worksheets, which might be even better than having to silence an entire class to hear a sports team be the punch line of yet another joke.

Some wonderful examples of witty answers on boring worksheets:

Q: What ended in 1896?

A: 1895

Q: Write an example of a risk.

A: This

Q: Explain how you found your answer in problem 4.

A: Math.

Q: Where was the Declaration of Independence signed?

A: At the bottom.

Q: The first cells were probably…?

A: Lonely.

Q: You fell on the playground and scratched your knee. What do you do?

A: Get up and deal with it.

Common sense does pay off because so many of these answers are 100% correct, technically speaking. Taking your learning out of context can really put it into perspective. So often we find that what we’ve learned has little real world application and on tests, so many real world lessons don’t fit into academia.

This all illustrates that streets smarts book smarts. You can double-check my math on that one if you want. Most of these responses came from small kids who can’t help but tell it like it is; however, it’s not impossible to rejuvenate your youth and hop on the bandwagon of reading questions plainly and answering from your heart.

Book and street smarts may not always mean the same thing, but both can lead to malapropisms that leave you laughing after a test. When school knowledge runs out, knowledge of life and a little bit of creativity can bring out the best on tests. When one kid was asked, “Name six animals which live specifically in the Arctic,” the response was “Two polar bears and three four seals.”

Sometimes, just coming up with outlandish stories for simple blunders can be amusing. Past Managing Editor, Cody Maynard, once was late to Mr. Salagovic’s class back in middle school. Sal questioned Cody about his tardiness, to which Cody replied with some ridiculous story about his toothpaste all coming out of the tube while brushing his pearly whites, and having to spend his morning jamming the paste back into it’s container. The most shocking part of the story is that Cody Maynard was late to class.

Throwing dark humor into the mix is always fun too, but also sad. One question was about consuming milk after a child swallows a cleaning product. The obvious answer for this person was, “to make them happy before they die.” The answer is blown out of proportion, but lye is no laughing matter. A more lighthearted story is when discussing literary works by deceased authors and a teacher may ask, “What is the author saying about this topic?” Many students, like Sophie Braker, would say, “He’s not saying anything. He’s dead.”