“Most of us are here today because our parents did not die as children.”  If anyone here has parents who are dead children, raise your hands.  I didn’t think so.  This was the sentence that inspired this entire gallery.  What this student meant to say was that most of us are here today, because our parents were cured of potentially fatal childhood diseases by medicines discovered through animal experimentation.

 

“I am not one to believe in the feet or paws of animals.”  You don’t believe animals have feet?  This one was for a paper on “The Monkey’s Paw,” and I think the student was trying to say that she did not believe that animal parts (like monkey paws or rabbit feet) have magical properties.

 

“I think Trekee’s are viewed as friendly and protective of their spaceship, which are qualities that a patient wants in their doctor.”  I certainly want a doctor that is concerned about my spaceship.  How about you?  This student was trying to interpret an ad for a Star Trek-themed dental office.

 

“I may be old fashioned but I hardly find that the words God, killed, and bastards appropriate for a three year old to say.”  God is a naughty word?  A student upset at the content of South Park lets his temper get ahead of his thinking.

 

“Chaos is the order that lives on, so it must be pure, and that is why it is the opposite of haste.”  Don’t feel bad: I don’t understand this one either.  Answering a question about The Name of the Rose, this student probably knew what she meant by this, but it makes no sense to me.

 

“The man telling this story has no credit from the beginning of the story, because you learn that he loves cats and has several of them and that he is a very predigests man he calls one of his cats nigger man, if that won’t make a person mad.”  The racism apparent in Lovecraft’s “The Rats in the Walls” can easily make any student angry.  But this sentence sends a reader the following message: the narrator is a bad person because he loves cats.  I think my cats would disagree with this.

 

“From my personal experience, I’ll respond that animals are very happy just the way they are, the don’t want to speak the human language or live like humans, animal more over will probably live a much better live if humans will completely be excluded from their habitat.”  I was quite curious to hear more about this student’s ability to communicate psychically with animals, but the real assignment was to show how animals are portrayed in the media.  The lesson here: stick to the question and avoid editorializing unless invited by the teacher to do so.

 

“Session after session, I would have to strip my Barbie to the bare minimum just to attract Ken’s attention, but now I had Donny Osmond.”  I always picture Barbie trying her best to seduce Ken, only to have his attention diverted by the handsome Donny.  It cracks me up every time.  This student was trying to explain how her tastes in toys changed over the years, but the sentence seems to wander off in another direction.

 

“Soap operas and other t.v. series are made up as well, A daughter wouldn’t sleep with her mother’s husband which would be her stepfather.”  Apparently this student has never been to West Virginia.  This particular sentence came from a batch of tests I was asked to grade by another professor.  So I am not the only teacher who gets sentences like these.

 

“One reason that there could be no tourists is that this is a town of vegetarians.”  Well, at least it might explain why Carrot Top refuses to perform there.  I think this student (who is interpreting a poem by African writer Yambo Ouologuem) is confused by the fact that the vegetarian narrator of the poem is wrongly accused of being a cannibal by his unthinking neighbors.

 

“Taking a close look at The X-Files, I may assume that Mulder is feminine (the blonde) and Scully the masculine (the man in black).  This may mean that Mulder is a female alien trapped in a male human body and Scully a transsexual.”  I know nothing is what it seems in The X-Files, but this goes a bit too far.  I wonder if this is meant to be sarcasm.  But that is an important lesson: what may sound like sarcasm when you read it aloud to yourself, may completely lose its irony on paper.