Just When You Think You've Seen It All.....

As a teacher you see and hear a lot of things that you just couldn't make up if you wanted to. Most of them are extremely hilarious and make my job extremely enjoyable. I joke that I'm going to make a calendar when I retire, with a funny story for each day of the year. This is one of those stories.... (I apologize in advance for the biology lesson.)

My students had a cell project that they had been working on for a few weeks. They needed to make 2 models of cells, identify and define the parts. The first, a simple cell (prokaryote) that looks something like this...

The second is a complex cell (eukaryote), which looks something like this...

One student had been working extremely hard on her project. She had stayed after school for help and had been giving me updates on the progress she was making. She struggles with English and I was excited that she had this project that she could really excel on because it didn't require an extensive knowledge of the English language. The day the project was due, she came into my classroom before school started to drop off her project. She was so excited to show me this project she had been working so hard on. As a teacher I had lots of positive comments ready to shower her with such as "Great job!" "I can tell you worked really hard on this" "It looks great" - well you get the picture. This is what she pulled out of her bag....

This is her prokaryote and in case you can't tell, the DNA is a big glob of hair. I honestly think that she pulled the hair out of her brush and glued it to her project. I was speechless and I think my response was something like "WOW....look at that!" I'm pretty sure she did it as a joke and I've teased her about it since, but when she pulled it out of her bag it completely caught me off guard.