Q: Have you had a student ever plug something in?
During a Broadway production of Hand to God at the Booth Theater, the site Broadway Adjacent reported that an audience member walked up to the stage to try to charge his phone. At first blush, we thought that this meant the man went up to the apron of the stage and charged it there. Nope! There's now video evidence showing that the rudest man on Broadway walked onto the stage to plug in his phone.
http://www.vulture.com/2015/07/video-guy-charging-phone-hand-to-god-broadway.html
Laptops and phones, but never anything crazy like a curling iron.
ReplyDeleteYes, the laptop, I never worry about. They at least APPEAR to be working. But a couple years ago I was in the middle of a (rare) lecture, more or less reading the riot act about following guidelines (oy vey, not again), and a guy in the back noisily made his way all the way through to the front (I checked his hands for weapons), and plugged his phone charger in and then set the phone RIGHT ON MY DESK.
DeleteI picked it up and faked like I was dialing, and he had the most offended look on his face. I thought it might be funny, but the rest of the students looked a little aghast as well.
Curling iron? That's rich. Was it the 80s? 70s?
I heard a story as well, surely apocraphyl, about a kid who plugged in a mini microwave. It can't be true, right? Prove me wrong.
Toaster. That'd be okay. I love toast. Gluten free bread. Oh, Dr. Jennifer told me ot quit dwelling on the negatives. More sessions!
DeleteWhen I was an undergrad, one of my peers walked into our class while the proffie was lecturing and stood there 1-2 feet from him waiting to ask him a question. Even my 19-year-old self thought that student was peculiar. I don't remember what the proffie's reaction was; I probably wanted to shout, "Hey. What the fuck are you doing? He's lecturing to us. Get out!" I don't think we had cell phones and curling irons back then.
ReplyDeleteCurling irons have been around for a while. In fact, that was one of things I removed from my grandmother's house when she was still (unwisely, probably, with the lack of wisdom mostly on our part) trying to live alone while beginning to lose touch a bit with daily reality. The other was her blowtorch (she'd been a silversmith, but using it no longer seemed like a good idea).
DeleteWhen I was a student, during a lab, a fellow student stuck a fork into an outlet (so, he was, in a sense, plugging himself in?). There was a loud crackling, popping sound, and then the faint whiff of burnt hair...
ReplyDeleteIn the same lab group, someone lit gas straight from the gas jet, rather than setting up a bunsen burner. What I remember the most was the freakishly loud roaring sound as a long flame shot out of the jet, spanning about 6-8 feet in length.
To this day I don't know how there are not more gas disasters in high school classrooms. That I was given the power of fire when I was simply a child makes me anxious even now.
DeleteIn the last lecture of my big chemistry class - 750 seater lecture room - in first year at uni, some kids brought in a couple of sandwich makers, plugged them in at the back of the top row, and made and sold toasted cheese sandwiches. The really funny bit was about 20 minutes in, when the smell clearly reached the front of the classroom, and the lecturer was sniffing surreptitiously without actually stopping teaching, clearly trying to work out if they could really smell toast...
ReplyDeleteIf one of my students found a way to produce a decent cheese sandwich toward the end of class, I just might buy it. The supposedly-fancy cafe-type franchise that has recently set up shop in our student center appears to make "toasted-cheese" sandwiches by squirting liquid cheese "food" of some sort on white bread and very briefly putting it through the panini press. Very unsatisfactory, especially for the price.
DeleteBuy a very small slow cooker (unless you are planning on making many sandwiches at once). Bake the cheese and any other ingredients directly inside the bread. If you are using any meat, it needs to be precooked. For the bread, I just use pizza dough. Make sure you don't burn the sandwich. It takes about an hour and certainly not more than one hour and a half.
DeleteMine plug in all the time, but we're in small classrooms and the use of devices that facilitate reading and writing is actually encouraged at least part of the time. The main issue is the tripping hazard created by cords stretched across aisles.
ReplyDeleteI would be nonplussed if one of my students strode up to the teacher's cockpit and tried to avail hirself of the outlets there, unless we were doing group work already and (s)he asked.
Yep, one of my students fucked a sheep.
ReplyDelete