I have a young student who has always had a particular comic style.
The other day, she decided she’d had enough of the pedagogical balance and that she wanted to do more teaching and less student-ing. So I got a very detailed lesson on how to create headings for English essays, which I think I retained pretty well.
After I had mastered formatting, she gave a little lecture on SOHCAHTOA…but first told me she didn’t like the mnemonic and had come up with her own mnemonic for the right triangle trig ratios.
Sort of. She had actually come up with a mnemonic for SOHCAHTOA…a mnemonic for the mnemonic.
Me: “I’m not sure this is very…streamlined.”
Student: “Shhh. Okay, I’ll write it out for you. SOH! Steal one horse. CAH! Catch another horse. TOA! Trot on away.
You have to admit it does have a certain internal logic.
On to the triangles.
Student: “So for this one, Student 1, we use cosine, which is adjacent over hypotenuse.”
Me/Student 1: “I’m feeling a bit dehumanized.”
Student: “Don’t worry about it. No talking back. Don’t distract Student 2 [gestures towards my glass of water]–he’s shy. Okay, here we have tangent, so we need opposite over hypotenuse–”
Me: “Adjacent.” (It slipped out)
Student: “What did you say?”
Me: “I…heard that somewhere, that it’s opposite over adjacent!”
Student: “Oh, you heard it from another teacher?”
Me: “Yes, that’s it!”
Student (leaning towards me and stage whispering): “You’ve been SEEING SOMEONE ELSE?”
After that I had to go to the bathroom, because I’d drunk half of Student 2.
When I returned I was treated to a song my student had written:
Student: “It’s called–okay, first you have to know that my name is Topsy. Okay. It goes: Aw….Topsy! They’ll say at my au….topsy! [pauses] Oh, you also need to know that I’m an elephant.”
There was more but I can’t really do it justice, and I missed some of it because I was crying with laughter.
So my student is a comic genius. If you disagree, well…you can Trot On Away.
