Good Morning, Afternoon, Evening or
whatever time it is when you are reading this!
We have begun the second semester and all exams have finally been marked
(almost a month ago but I’ve been a bit lazy about blog writing). The students performed quite well, indeed
some of them too well which meant there were not so many contestants for the
Penultimate Jibjokha Amusing and Confusing Exam Answer Awards!
This means I get to feel pride that some of
my students seem to have learned something from my classes and yet still have a
sore head from banging my head on my desk.
However, I did not suffer as many injuries as last year.
The first award to be given this year is
Wol’s Award for Truly Creative Spelling.
This is a category in which many students
excel as many believe that spelling rules and even phonetics are to be
completely ignored.
First, the runner ups.
Well done to the year 6 student who told me
about their ‘prantch.’ And well done to
any of you who worked out that they meant ‘parents.’
Good try to the year 7 student who wrote to
their ‘Rectaepted’ principal. Slightly
easier to work out that they meant ‘Respected.’
A round of applause to the year 6 student
who told me about ‘Soseastudy.’ They
were not referring to a branch of marine biology, instead, as you will hear
when you say it out loud, they meant ‘Social Studies.’
But the winner of Wol’s Award has to go to
another year 6 student for making ‘knowledge’ look and sound like a Tolkien
villain by spelling the word as ‘norglath.’
(Help us, Aragorn! Save us from the evil Norglath!)
We now move on to another favourite award
of the judge, Inigo Montoya’s I Do Not Think It Means What You Think It Means
Award.
There were three brave contestants for this
award. The first being a year 8 student
who I hope is not as violent as their entry makes them sound. (For those of you
who do not live in Bhutan, ‘Pema’ is a person’s name):
‘I shall mow the Pema.’ (You do
and you clean it up yourself!)
The second was also a year 8 student who
also managed a grammatically correct sentence (which was really all the exam
question required) that still manage to draw a wonderful mental scene for the
reader:
‘I shall be forgiving my pen.’ (You are a very bad pen for writing all
those naughty words but I shall forgive you if you promise not to do it again!)
But the mental image made by winner’s
sentence was just too good to not give them the award:
‘Tamas Edson was the invader of the
lightbulb.’ (We can’t let it keep all that tungsten
filament to itself! Company, attack!)
It is now time for a new award. I call it the Um, Wait, What? Award for
Excellence in Confusing the Judge. There
were so many contestants for this award that I could fill about 3 blogs with
their entries but seriously, your brains would explode from confusion. It was only thanks to my truly heroic intake
of Nutella while marking that I am still with you today.
First, the runner ups (or is that runners
up?)
For the terrifying mental image and
confusing statement of:
‘Smoke can body make like butter’ the year
8 student gets an honourable mention.
Another honourable mention to the year 7
student who wrote the utterly confusing statement:
‘There will be wang from the lam.’ I really don’t know what that means and
perhaps that’s for the best.
The final honourable mention goes to a year
8 student who told me:
‘It is not good for fighting and kick the
bucket is not good.’ To be fair, I think
she got confused by an idiom lesson I gave about a month before the exam.
But the winner seems to have been going for
a very profound philosophical statement which my inferior brain just could not
comprehend:
‘In my mind I will energy the energy will
finest.’ Did anyone else get a flashback
to the ‘I can kill you with my brain’ line from Firefly? Should I be
frightened?
Another new award is the Susan B Anthony You
Go Girl Award which this year goes to a year 7 student who wrote a whole paragraph
on how the moral of Metroid (I gave
the synopsis of the Nintendo game as a passage in the exam) was how girls can
do things better than boys and girls are stronger and smarter because they save
the Solar System. (I wrote on her exam that perhaps ‘just as good’ was perhaps,
maybe, more appropriate than ‘better.’ Was I wrong to do that?)
It is now time for the Roger of the Raj You’ve Got Their Position Slightly Wrong Award.
For the poetry section, I gave the year 7s
the poem The Mewlips by Tolkien. It is a perfectly lovely poem about a race of
human-eating, gold-hoarding demon-like creatures which live in swamps. You know, fun for the whole family. Before going on with the award I would like
to say that my father first recited the poem to me when we were at a muddy pond
in the Margalla Hills. Perfect timing as
always, dad!
Honourable mentions go to the student who
said the poem made them feel ‘happy’ and ‘interested to see the beautiful
places’ and ‘interested to meet the Mewlips with their gold.’ Well, who am I to judge if they want to go
and meet these creatures who like to keep bones in a sack. (I would also like
to point out that I told the students that the poem was not true and they should
not get scared of the creatures. Sometimes
I lie to keep the students from not being able to sleep.)
But there can only be one winner and that
honour goes to the student who told me that ‘the Mewlips are friendly because
they feed people.’ She thought it was
very funny when I told her that ‘You go to find the Mewlips, and the Mewlips
feed’ meant something slightly different.
We now come to the Ravenous Bug-Blatter
Beast of Trall’s Award for Logic. This
award was won by two year 6 students for their answers to the question ‘Why
would you not think the Oliphaunt was true?’
The year 6s also got a Tolkien poem but theirs was the slightly less
scary Oliphaunt.
One student told me:
‘I not think that the Oliphaunt is true you
wont think I’m true.’
And the other:
‘I think that the Oliphaunt is true because
Oliphaunts won’t think I am true.’
Sadly, I’ve tried the old ‘I won’t believe
in you so you won’t believe in me’ trick on irritating humans and it works
about as well as ‘if I can’t see you, you can’t see me.’
The last proper award is Sigmund’s Freudian
Slip Award. This student made a
statement which I think is accidentally true of so many students around the
world today. However, well done to them
for realising they were using an adverb.
They wrote:
‘I studying very hardly.’
Well, you and half the kids attending
school today. And, to be fair, at least
a lot of my students have to walk an awfully long way to school and do farm work when they get
home. That’s a much better excuse for
hardly studying than ‘I had to beat my high score in Bejewelled!’
Other funny statements I got that I just
can’t think of categories for include:
‘My favourite book is all Dzongkha story
book and all english story book.’
Perhaps the ‘Slight Exaggeration’ category?
‘[The emus] live in left side of Australian
coat of arm’
I didn’t actually ask the student what she
though a ‘coat of arm’ was though I might have got an interesting answer if I
had. I also couldn’t remember which side
the emu stood on and so just guessed.
And finally:
‘Our farmers are depend on agriculture.’
Can I give that a ‘Pointing Out the
Bleeding Obvious’ Award?
I shall end the Award Ceremony with two
more amusing statements I saw during the holidays which prove that you do not
need to be a student to get a mention for unintentionally funny
statements. The first, well, company
name more than statement that made me smile was the ‘Ocean Views’ tour
company. They’ve either got amazing eyes
or amazingly lost.
The second was a decal on the windshield of
a taxi which told me to ‘Prise the Lord.’
Off what?
So just remember, don’t study and do your
best to misunderstand and misremember everything and you too could get an award
for
* All grammar and spelling errors in award winning sentences or phrases
were copied from the students’ answers.
Please don’t ask me to correct them.
All grammar and spelling errors in the bits that I wrote you can only
point out if you’re my dad because there’s no way I can stop him from doing so. Hugs!
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