Things That Make Me Laugh: My Students' Essays

Every once in a while a teacher will hand me a tremendous stack of essays to grade. I'm always given a 2 week deadline with which to finish everything, which gives me more than enough time to savor every last subject-verb disagreement, every run-on sentence, and every misspelled word (out of fear of making a dangerously ironic mistake, I had check if misspell had two S's or not).

Sometimes I get essays where I can't help but to chuckle to myself: I'm quite sure my students purposely put these cryptic messages in their work since they know I'm the one who has to eventually grade them. Sadly, since most of the teachers don't exactly appreciate it, I'm not allowed to award points for attempted humor.

Here are some excerpts from a few essays I copied by hand so that I could share them with you. In order to capture each one in its essence, I chose to leave the structure and the grammatical mistakes intact.

(The purpose of this essay was to analyze and record information from a graph. This particular graph plotted the levels of unemployment in Japan over a series of years. I find essays like these extremely funny because they initially answer the topic, but without warning they morph into something else entirely. Before you know it, you'll be reading about Japnese baseball players when the students were supposed to be writing about their favorite food)

A Lonely Student

[...]
In 1990 however, there were nearly 5,616 Japanese are complete-ness unemployment. Hang in there Japan. Hang in to the end Japanese pelpou. This is an increase of about 11.7 times. I'm lonely. Japan. It really gets me down, Oh boy. Its really a headache. I can't sleep well because I have so many worries. I'm scared.




(In this essay, the students were required to analyze a chart listing behavioral statistics of certain animals. Towards the end it gets a little hazy. What they're saying sounds silly and isn't entirely wrong, but I neither have the time nor the patience to rewrite their essays word for word. Instead I leave most of these mistakes unmarked, which probably means the student will continue his life thinking what he wrote was perfectly acceptable)

Bats and Deer

[...]
2nd type rests during the day like owls and bats. I want to be like bats. Your'e lucky. The 3rd rests at day and night and is active at sunrise and sunset like deer and lions. I want to be like deer. Nice life. I'm almost jealous life. I'm interested in deer life.




Shougatsu

(In this essay the students were instructed to tell me about "Shougatsu", the period that includes the first few days of the new year. I included this piece not only for the obvious reason of trailing off into another subject entirely, but also because for some reason students enjoy using particular set phrases they remember from a lesson years ago. For example, "thats too bad," or "what a shame" make appearances more than once in a student's essay in order to take up space. See if you can spot where the student uses one of these phrases)

I like "Shougatsu,"
Because I can enjoy and eat a dericious food with family.
Oh... I must apologize to you for taking a lai.
I don't like "Shougatsu" really.
I'm very very very very sorry.
That's a pity.
Yeah...
Do you like baseball?
No, I don't.
But, I watch baseball game on TV.
Oh, That's a pity.
I watch it in baseball park.
Rearry? I envy you for it.

(If you are confused about the multiple indentations, the essay sheets have lines numbered from 1-10. The required length must fill exactly 10 lines. Some students think they can outsmart me by starting new lines when they have plenty of space to finish. Sometimes they go well and beyond 10 lines using this method to make me think they are going above what is required of them, when actually they haven't even written half of what they were supposed to. Apart from humor, I wish the teachers would allow me to give points for craftiness and cunning.)