El universo misterioso
Term finished at the end of June. We
are still embroiled in the inconvenience known as Summer School, but as in my
case this basically consists of playing with toys (helping kids to build small robots)
it’s not really that much of an imposition. The same can’t be said for the fact
that I have to wear trousers in 40-degree heat, which I’m pretty sure violates
the Human Rights Act. But it turns out that’s a useless load of bollocks
anyway. Who knew?
Whilst performing the various end of
term duties including filing things that don’t need to be filed, carving data
into your arm with the point of a compass and throwing away everything you can
lay your hands on including, it would seem, a perfectly decent pair of
sunglasses I unearthed the Question Box. Faded, neglected and almost forgotten forever
underneath a pile of unused SPAG practice papers, the Box had been unused for a
couple of months and was still full of questions just itching to be answered. In
all the giddy excitement of preparing for SATs (sort of – by which I mean both
sort of preparing and sort of SATs) it seems we hadn’t done any actual work,
like finding out why some boys love other boys or why people in Australia don’t fall
off.
I couldn’t bring myself to throw them
away, and as I haven’t posted anything for a long old time – my other posts-in-progress
still stubbornly refusing to write themselves – I thought I’d share them with
you. The questions reveal a number of things, including a few issues with the past
conditional: there’s the usual mix of the everyday and the surreal, the
blindingly obvious and the utterly impossible, and a fair few missing question
marks. Evolution, reproduction (still) and gravity seem to have put the wind up
them, and at least one of my students has developed an interest in alternate
realities, like the one in which 100 billion people die, or the one where there
are no monkeys.
So here they are, in no particular
order, the collected and last questions of the 6AT Question Box, for now.
How they discorver the phytoplankton?
Why the big bang appeared?
If 100 billion people die what happens?
Why does the light travel so quiqly.
How are we like we are?
How plants grow so slowly?
What is the evolution of any reptile?
1+1 = 2. Why is that correct?
What is it? (Accompanied by a
picture of something that looks like a sock puppet, and an explanatory note in Spanish:
La bola de la garganta. I’ll never know whether this student was confused
by Adam’s apples or simply worried about a lump in her throat.)
Did we evolve because a monkey had a
baby like a human and then the baby of the monkey that is like a human had a
human baby?
Who is more clever boys or girls? (Underlined,
with a note: yes) Why?
Why did we evolve?
Why the animals existed?
Who invented gr.
Who decided languages or words?
If dinosaurs never existed, what is of
us?
Why can’t we fly?
Is it real that bacterias help us?
If we have the uniform blue and black
can someone see it green (crossed out) black and white? (Asked at the
height of the blue and black/white and gold dress debacle, explained here.)
Why does babys need milk?
How do we have babies? SAY IT!
Whay do [illegible] evolve?
Can we do English?
Why does some animals reproduce without
any man with them?
How many eggs can a frog.
If Isaac Newton never discovered the gravity
what would happen?
Why is Hitler so stupid.Who is
this? (Accompanied by a stick man, labelled Alberto.)
Why do we have defects?
Can we practice the show?
Can it be possible to make a
non-natural human?
If TV never exist what happens?
Why does the sun burns so much?
Why aren’t we all the same length?
Why if wee are upside down do you still
have blood in your feet?
If monkes (crossed out) monkeys
exiting what would happen?
How can we have babies?
If schools never exist what would
happen?
You’d be fine, kid.
 |
| What indeed. |
