Teacher Training

Kids Still Say the Darndest Things!

From the Bridgewater State University website: 
"The spirit, vision and leadership of Horace Mann, America’s father of public education, lives on more than 184 years after Bridgewater State University first opened its doors for the purpose of training teachers. His belief, not only in the importance of public education, but also in standardizing — or normalizing — the training of teachers, led to the establishment of normal schools.

In 1840, Bridgewater became the third such school in the commonwealth of Massachusetts and, along with its sister institutions, developed a comprehensive approach to teacher training that became a model emulated throughout the country and across the globe.
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Bridgewater Normal School grew as the educational needs of society evolved. Not only were more and better qualified teachers essential to a prosperous and engaged citizenry, but the demand for a college-level liberal arts curriculum required that the Massachusetts General Court expand course offerings at the normal schools and establish public institutions of higher education."
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By coincidence, I came across a copy of a tattered Bridgewater Normal School news bulletin from 1893 with a range of stories and announcements for educators. One section that caught my eye was called, "Odds and Ends," and it does offer a chuckle and the conclusion that, the more things change, the more they stay the same. Students will try to snow the teacher when they really don't know the answer!
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(From the Bridgewater State Normal School bulletin, "The Normal Offering" February, 1893 verbatim.)

-High School Teacher: " Briefly describe the heart and its functions."

-Pupil: "The heart is a comical shaped bag, and is divided into several parts by a fleshy petition. These parts are called right artillery, left artillery and so forth. The function of the heart
is between the lungs. The work of the heart is to repair different organs in about half a minute."

—A grammar school boy who was told to look up rivers, reported as follows:

A river has a head, its highest and smallest part; it has arms which are also its feeders, and a right and left side. It has a bed in which there are often springs and in which the river runs instead of lying still.
At the farthest extremity from its head, we do not find its foot but its mouth. It eats into hills sometimes and is known to have falls at which it usually roars.

-Teacher in Physics to a boy at the head of class: "How many kinds of force are there?"
Boy: Three, sir. 
Teacher:  "Name them."
Boy: "Bodily force, mental force, and the police force."

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