1. “Ching-chongs”
During an International Business class, during a chapter on Mainland China: “Why do we have to study about ching-chongs anyway?”
She went on to argue with my Chinese prof about Chinese culture.
2. The gay agenda
A girl in my English class wrote that legalizing gay marriage will create “800 million new jobs in the United States.”
3. Was she trolling or…
“Venezuela is in Africa right?” and “Wait….Australia is a country and a continent?!?” “If Osama was killed then who’s running our country?”
This was a senior level college course and this girl was going to be our student speaker at our commencement.
4. I don’t think wasps think like that
During a discussion about reincarnation: “What if you got reincarnated as, like, a wasp, and you were like ‘I don’t like wasps!’ and stung yourself?”
5. Why would you even…Bronies…damn…
Last semester I had an intro to sociology class.
We had a blind girl in the class. Like not kind of blind, but 100% blind.
There was a really awkward brony guy who quite obviously had a crush on the blind girl, which is fine. But his way of getting her attention and flirting was just terrible.
At the start of the year he’d just sit by her and guide her to her desk (against her wishes, she was quite independent, she had one of those walking cane things) and he’d always try to talk to her and stuff. And she would talk back, but she obviously wasn’t interested.
Towards the end of the year he began to get frustrated with his repeat failed attempts and flirting with her, so he resorted to blind jokes in class.
This class was a very discussion oriented class and so there was a lot of talking and discussion. The weird guy would fit in a blind joke any opportunity he could and then after he’d finish laughing to himself out loud (they weren’t even funny jokes. It was so awkward listening to him saying things like, ‘MAYBE THEY WERE DEVIANT BECAUSE THEY WERE BLIND’ and then laughing to himself very audibly) and then after he finished laughing he’d lean over to the blind girl and say, “Haha, you know I’m just kidding, right?” and she’d just nod and say, “Sure.”
There isn’t anything in particular that he said that was especially stupid, it was just all stupid. His constant attempts at flirting, his blind jokes, the awkward laugh he’d do to himself. Trying to bring up MLP in the class discussions was not uncommon.
He was really awkward and kind of rude.
6. Can’t say hippo, eh
“And there was a hipp… a hipp…a funny-lookin’ elephant.”
Trying to find the word hippopotamus.
7. The Supreme Commander smiles down at you, with praise
“The leader of North Korea looks like Psy. What’s his name ? Like Genghis Khan or something?”
8. She sounds like a complete moron
Girl from LA telling us how she has a house right on the “Specific Ocean.” I kid you not.
9. Everyone knows black people originated from Canada
“Why did they bring slaves from Africa when they could have gotten black people from the Caribbean?” – African Studies class
10. World War II, 1939 to 2014
We had a girl ask if World War Two was still going on in history class while we were going over WW2 in class. She didn’t ask the teacher, she asked us while we had study time in class. Some of my friends decided it was a good opportunity to mess with her, and they told an interesting narrative about how it was still raging on in Europe. One of the guys was Jewish so he topped it off by saying that his parents had to come over from Italy after they discovered their son was born Jewish.
Secondly, this girl was completely air-headed in high-school and she completely bought my friends historical adaptation of WWII… At least she did until we finished the unit on WWII in class, anyways. I was there, but I didn’t add anything to their story, I had a lot of trouble trying to stifle my laughter. This girl was not the nicest person either so I didn’t mind the joke on her.
But my goodness, did she ever change after high school. She graduated from a decently sized university with a major in political science, and even served on student government for the last couple years. She is also a registered member of a political party. I think she is in law school now. (I haven’t talked to her since she finished Uni two years ago.)
She is also much nicer than she was. She used to be very manipulative, but I’d put money that people weren’t having that in uni, so she was forced to change.
The point is that you hear these stories, and sometimes it’s not just sheer idiocy. She legitimately didn’t know about WWII, and yeah, that was partly because she was a ditzy plastic chick who only cared about parties in high school. She moved on from that and is making something of herself. I guess what I’m trying to say is that when you hear stories about a person doing something stupid, and they are funny and it’s okay to laugh, but take it with a grain of salt, because there is always something that you don’t know too, and making fun of people for ignorance can harmful. The way western culture is is that when somebody gets a poor score or doesn’t know something they feel like something is wrong with them, or that they are stupid, and it definitely can hurt their progress to be cruelly made fun of.
I have a brother with special needs, and some kids bullied him, calling him a retard, etc., and it destroyed his confidence and self-esteem to an extreme degree. I’m just saying, that in real life, as much fun as it is to mess with people, or laugh at stupidity, sometimes it’s better to not.
11. I lived to tell this tale
“I survived Sudden Infant Death Syndrome or SIDS as a baby.”
12. Sounds really smart, this one
“If Barack is our president, who’s Obama?”
“Why don’t we just print more money to pay of our debts?” – I hear this one a lot.
13. Law school. LAW SCHOOL.
“THIS IS AN UNFAIR AMOUNT OF BOOKS, YOU EXPECT ME TO READ ALL OF THEM? IT’S NOT LIKE THEY’RE GOING TO HELP ME LATER IN MY CAREER” – Law school
14. Did you know that every single movie is a documentary and therefore, real?
I took an environmental science class years ago, we were learning about the layers of the earth and how their density, thickness, etc. are measured. At some point a girl raised her hand and asked ‘I saw a documentary about them drilling to the core, is that how we know the core is metal?” She was referring to The Core which I’m not sure how you would confuse for a documentary. The professor told her they had to stop short of the core because actually drilling in to it would cause all of the gravity to leak out. I don’t think she did too well in that class.
15. We got a joker here
In my spanish class:
“I thought Dolores was a name! Not money!”
16. Excuse me while I throw up from laughing so hard
Not really said out loud, but a girl once wrote Cockasian in an essay.
17. It’s the type of beer they used to drink in the 30s, almost like P.B.R, you know
I was in an American History course and we were discussing the 1930s (and had been for a number of classes) when a girl who sat up front, who always arrived early and took very eager notes, raised her hand and asked… “What’s an F.D.R.?”
18. Maybe she learned to read more carefully and to not jump the gun
I know you asked for college, but a girl in my brothers hs science class asked if earth was a planet.
Same girl also told everyone she was going to a university (Toronto I think) and then found out she had only received the letter confirming they had received her app. She was rejected.
She’s in law school now which is frightening.
19. Uh, yes.
Middle of an exam
“Is this being graded?”
I kid you not.
20. And now this ended up on the INTERNET
A few years out from college, but I must share:
I’m in an Anthropology class, one of 200 or so students in a massive auditorium. The topic of communication and the changes in culture that comes up when it improves is brought up one day in class, and the teacher asks for examples.
One student stands up, his voice booming like that of an angry god, drowning out even the professor and his microphone.
“The Internet!” the student proclaims.
“Yes, that’s a good–” is as far as the prof got before the guy continued.
“And if it wasn’t for brave hippies standing against The Man only the government would have Internet today!”
Silence filled the auditorium, as though the capacity for sound had fled the building as the first bits of stupid came from the guy’s lips. What followed was an alternate history so out there Harry Turtledove would have been furious materbating with one hand while taking copious notes with the other.
We learned of the armed insurrection that occurred because hippies recognized the importance of the coming technology. Of the battles fought to keep the technology out of the shadows so everyone would know of its existence, and how we would be in an oppressive police state if not for the efforts of the Flower Power generation.
The prof just stood there unmoving through it all. When the guy had finished the prof took a deep breathe, and said two things.
“The government is responsible for the Internet. You should look up some facts before you talk.”
“Don’t talk again,” was the second thing he said.
The guy never did.
21. Nice try social justice person
We had a guest speaker come to our campus and speak about how dropping the bombs on japan was a race thing and we didn’t do it to Germany because they were white. Out history professor who Writes the test and text book used across the nation pointed out the reason we didn’t nuke Germany was because they surrendered before we had finished making the atomic bomb. She got very embarrassed and packed her shit and left.
22. That’s malicious and really a terrible, insensitive thing to say
Day after the a student committed suicide on campus. I heard some girl say, “I wish more Asians would kill themselves more so my major would be less competitive.”
23. You get a popcorn tree
A student in my friend’s veterinarian program wanted to know what would grow if you planted popcorn kernels outside.
24. Maybe if you were Boston
“So ‘cat’ is the past tense of ‘cut’ right? Like, ‘I cat myself with my knife.'”
25. Koro is a real thing
In an anthropology class I once took, we were discussing cultural specific disorders – i.e. anorexia and bulimia in western cultures. In some Asian cultures, there is a disorder called Koro where the male has delusions of penis shrinkage and retraction into the body. This kid yells out, “Oh, no wonder Asians have such small penises!” There was an Asian dude sitting next to him that just turned to him and said “You bastard.”
26. How do people get by in college?
Not a current student, but in one senior level class we had a project partner create a brochure about our teams proposed product/service. His first draft explained how smoove our process was. Had a puzzled look when we told him smooth was spelled wrong.
27. JUST EXPLAIN IT TO ME
It was one of my last semesters of college, and the Networking Infrastructure class was just finishing up. We covered network topologies, routing protocols, routing and serving equipment, etc. It’s the last day, we’re on a tour of the college networking center. Now, most of the people in this class could have passed the final and gotten the Net+ cert in their sleep before they even took the class. But not this one lady.
It gets to be the very end of the tour, and the instructor asks “Does anyone have any questions?”
She asks “So what exactly is a server?”
You could see the hope for humanity drain from the instructors face as he stared at her, dumbfounded, trying and failing to summon the strength to respond in a coherent manner while restraining himself from fleeing in horror from the room.
28. Quick on his feet
I’ll give a personal story. I took an Applied Media Aesthetics course, and they were discussing toys that were making comebacks. Every single conversation in this class talked about Star Wars. I mentioned legos and how I used to make shitty looking TMNT heads with lego pieces, but I swapped TMNT for Star Wars to try and connect.
A girl turned to me and said, “You needed instructions to build a Luke Skywalker head? Were you retarded as a child?”
It was the most ridiculous thing said to me by someone in a class full of Star Wars nerds. I retorted with, “I thought girls were made of sugar, spice and all things nice, not a cup of bitch.”
She dropped the class.
29. They were kinda doing the whole “Israel wasn’t a country yet” thing
A girl in an Arab-Israeli history class once asked why Israel did not do more to help out the Jews during World War II.
30. Jesus christ
African American Studies class:
Teacher: Can anybody tell me what Jim Crow was?
White male: Isn’t he like a famous country singer or something?
immediately after that answer
White female: No, no he was a icon for black people.
31. Adelph Hitlor
Someone misspelled Hitler as “Hitlor.” Ah yes, Hitlor, your friendly neighborhood IKEA employee.
Apparently the rest of the paper was so horribly misspelled and factually incorrect that le professeur tossed it, but the memory of “Hitlor” shall never die.
32. How – what – where – we weren’t even talking about Uzbekistan!
Uzbekistan is in Australia right? During a Roman History class… I don’t even remember how the subject came up.
