What seventh-grade students want to be when they grow up

Date:April 3, 2006 / year-entry #118
Tags:non-computer;the-wisdom-of-seventh-graders
Orig Link:https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20060403-04/?p=31683
Comments:    19
Summary:Another episode in the sporadic series on the wisdom of seventh graders: The topic this time is "What do you want to be when you grow up?" The students really enjoyed this topic because, as one young man put it, "I could write a book about myself!" Here are what some students had to say....

Another episode in the sporadic series on the wisdom of seventh graders: The topic this time is "What do you want to be when you grow up?" The students really enjoyed this topic because, as one young man put it, "I could write a book about myself!" Here are what some students had to say. Spelling mistakes are intact, but ellipses are editorial. (I have provided tooltips to assist non-native English speakers. Actually, even native English speakers may have trouble with some of the spelling errors...)

  • The best job in the world would be a dog consultant.
  • I also watch the history channel because you can never know too much about history.
  • My talent would be having good mojo.
  • In science I am achieving an easy A, and hardly giving it my all.
  • I like to blow up stuff.
  • Couciling teens is a low stress job, and you get paid a lot of money.
  • I am very interested in rockets and their purpltion sistims.
  • Also my dad does not believe I will be able to become a dentist so my goal is to prove him wrong and become a dentist.
  • I want to be a arcetecture.
  • Theories can turn into farts by proving it.
  • I've been called short and weird, but no one has ever called me chicken. In fact, if I were a chicken every chicken would call me "backa" or "cluck-chirp".
  • (From a male student) Also another reason good pay is important is because if I get married and have kids... I want to buy them nice things. For example, a wedding ring, dress, food... an alarm system...
  • There is no better job then getting paid to argue.
  • (About being a doctor) You get to help them by saving their life or getting a lego out of their throat and are rewarded with joy.
  • I would slide down the helicopter ropes and bust in to save the day.
  • Creating is creativity.
  • There is now whining or crying in 5th grade.
  • I have went to every Huskie home game in the past 5 years.
  • I wanted to be a writer, but writing this paper makes me think I shouldn't.
  • I will understand that no matter the child, the punishment will fit the crime. No student will be left behind.
  • I have the natural ability to become frustrated.
  • I will have a sufficient retirement if I don't go bankrupt.
  • (About being an architect) Make everything extremely simple... architects have to deal with the puenie minded construction worker around them.
  • My ways of teaching will make life and school a lot easier, I will clearly write my name on the whiteboard, in purple ink and I will have a neon green poster board with the rules written on it.

Bonus misspellings: omocinal, nurcher, pation, mussuse.

(And I thought I didn't have to say this, but apparently I do: These are just the funny-bad sentences. There were of course plenty of well-written essays, but they're not as funny.)

Bonus explanation: In the previous series of essays on humanity's greatest invention or discovery, one of the responses was "marrying a princess". I had to ask my friend for an explanation of that one. "Well, one student decided to ignore the assigned topic and instead wrote a fairy tale about a beautiful princess who gets married."

Comments (19)
  1. Brian Kemp says:
    April 3, 2006 at 12:29 pm

    I would have figured that the <abbr> and <acronym> tags would have worked fine for your purposes.

    That seems like a lot of work with those <span> tags.

  2. BryanK says:
    April 3, 2006 at 12:58 pm

    Well, except nothing in there is an acronym, so an acronym tag would not have been appropriate.  And abbr wouldn’t have been exactly correct, either (these aren’t short versions of other words or phrases, they’re misspelled versions of other words).  ;-)

    I’m not aware of a tag meaning "this is incorrect usage", though, so I’d say span is actually most appropriate.  (Perhaps the <strike> tag, but that’s deprecated; you’re supposed to use CSS for that now.)

  3. Raymond Chen - MSFT says:
    April 3, 2006 at 1:00 pm

    And none of them would have provided the dotted line and tooltip…

  4. Jeff says:
    April 3, 2006 at 1:43 pm

    English just rips off other languages for bits and pieces. The spelling rules are an absolute horror… I assume everyone’s heard of the "ghoti" spelling for "fish"?

    I’m sort of lucky in that I seem to have a built-in proofreader for whatever wacky reason. I can look at a page, poster, website, piece of marketing material, etc and any misspellings jump out in bold type.

    It made me very unpopular with an English Lit friend for a while. "It took me 30 seconds to find all the errors, and YOU’RE the Lit major!" :)

  5. Someone says:
    April 3, 2006 at 3:43 pm

    Are you sure ‘omocinal’ is ’emotional’, not ‘homocidal’ :-)

  6. Nick Fitzsimons says:
    April 3, 2006 at 4:01 pm

    "I wanted to be a writer, but writing this paper makes me think I shouldn’t."

    Priceless! Reading that sentence makes me think she/he should be.

  7. Harry says:
    April 3, 2006 at 6:15 pm

    Good god… a non-technical discussion and people have to start criticising the HTML tags used? Is your life that bereft? Take the article for what it was, a bit of light relief.  

    Some day you may realise that the world does not revolve around computers and coding.

    Keep up the good work Raymond.

    (I apologise Raymond if this post goes against the ToC for this site, but those kind of comments p!$% me off)

  8. kbiel says:
    April 3, 2006 at 6:54 pm

    >English just rips off other languages for bits and pieces. The spelling rules are an absolute horror…

    There are rules?  Huh?  Who woulda thunk it?

  9. Marcel says:
    April 3, 2006 at 9:10 pm

    I actually didn’t need most hints, but still very considerate of you for prividing them, thank you.

  10. Gabe says:
    April 3, 2006 at 11:33 pm

    I think Jeff is accusing English as being the Microsoft of natural languages.

  11. sleepsleep says:
    April 4, 2006 at 2:12 am

    i love the thought of kids.

    so pure.

    wonder how many adults still hold their child dream and working on it.

    or just simply get a job to earn a living.

    should life be so pathetic like that? lol

  12. Name required says:
    April 4, 2006 at 3:35 am

    Did George Bush take part in this competition?

  13. Roger clark says:
    April 4, 2006 at 10:42 am

    "Giving it my all" isn’t really incorrect. It’s just a casual phrase.

  14. Raymond Chen - MSFT says:
    April 4, 2006 at 11:01 am

    I also glossed phrases that non-native speakers may have trouble finding in a dictionary, such as "mojo" and "easy A".

  15. Michael J. says:
    April 4, 2006 at 3:59 pm

    You could translate "easy A" as "easy 5" ;-)

  16. Tobi says:
    April 5, 2006 at 8:10 am

    Thank you Raymond, this made my day. :)

    @Nick Fitzsimons: I had the same idea, when I read that statement.

  17. Marcel says:
    April 5, 2006 at 11:00 am

    ‘You could translate "easy A" as "easy 5" ;-)’

    Well, in German schools 5 is the second worst grade, so… no, you couldn’t ;-)

  18. Techies blog » Elm??letek says:
    April 6, 2006 at 5:09 pm

    PingBack from http://techies.teamlupus.hu/2006/04/06/elmeletek/hu/

  19. The Old New Thing says:
    August 31, 2006 at 10:00 am

    Self-confidence, perhaps.

Comments are closed.


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