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Humor Column

By Barbara McLay, University of South Florida

Sometimes You Have to Laugh

One lively class I teach gets a little too much into their reading sometimes. We were analyzing an article on steps to take if you think you are in an abusive relationship, and we were listing on the board the major supporting details. When we got to the fourth and last step, the article said if counseling failed the abused person should leave, but a male student yelled out, “Leave, hell! That’s all wrong! She should throw the bastard out!” A female replied, “Or the bitch; this says that women can be abusers, too!”

Not Yet Perfectly Fluent

The statistics of middle school teens having sex is increasing.

Prostitution becomes worse and worse each year. In the past this issue did not exist. Young girls would carry themselves with the upmost respect and would not engage in such behavior until they understood the meaning of sexuality.

If the anti-spanking proponents do not believe in spanking, why spend time doing research on parents who spank? The research should show the differences between parents who spank and those who do not.

Laws are made for a reason, and without government-enforced laws, Americans would live in a country with utter chaos.

There are fine correlations between couples living together before marriage and married couples living together.

The main character’s mother is in a nice, pleasant, expensive nursing home due to a very difficult problem with a critical cerebral impairment due to her extreme old age and from suffering from a severely intellectually challenged mental state of mind. [You can almost read this student’s thoughts: Wow! 41 words! I’m nearly ten percent done!]

Students' Perspectives

The author does a pretty good job of describing the setting, but if no one has ever heard of a nursing home before, they would probably be lost. I have not visited a nursing home, but I don’t have anything against them. The food is not something I would want to eat because it seems that most of it is soft food for people without teeth.

From a student reading The Scarlet Letter: I would like to encourage the author to write more books like that so that people like me who do not like to read will be hooked on the book and will be asking for more.

Contributions

Please share with us your funny classroom experiences or faux pas from students’ papers. Send contributions to bmclay@cchd.usf.edu. Please put “LCN Humor” as the subject.

Questions or comments? Contact the author at bmclay@cchd.usf.edu.

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