much has been said about being a teacher. some say you do the world a whole lot of good. it's a vocation, they say, and they make you into a modern-day hero. you (sometimes) get summers off, not to mention semestral breaks and christmas breaks. if you teach in the right school and the right grade level, you come home on christmas with boxes of gifts, some amazing, some you'd rather do without, but gifts nonetheless.

what they didn't tell you would be the laughs you'd get out of examinations. wait, not really giving examinations, but the answers students give you during examinations.

for the longest time, i've never had to read anything THAT amusing in an examination. i mean, if you had a cousin answer "tik-ti-laok" to one question in a social studies quiz in reply to the question, "what do you call the town crier who signals the start of the prayer hour in muslim communities", it'll be pretty hard to top that, right? more often than not, i just get really, really exasperated marking one wrong answer after another.

but then the recent exam i gave my students brought me something totally blog worthy:

Question: Wendell and marion were eating at Manong's, a canteen in front of La Consolacion sports Academy when Yok-yok and Inggo, members of the rival fraternity began a fistfight. Wel Padilla, a teacher at La Consolacion Sports Academy, spied the fight and immediately reported the incident to the school prefect ...

Answer: ... Wela Padilla's spying was definitely wrong. She is not being a good teaher and example to her co-faculty and students.

the student barely passed the exam with a 3.0