A boat? Into the mountains?

So....I don't usually blog at work (although technically school is over). But I wanted to make sure that the following gems were not forgotten.

1st Pd.: My AP class was reading a feminist satire called "Why I Want A Wife," by Judy Brady, where she writes from a male perspective to outline all the of the unreasonable expectations that men were unfairly placing on wives and mothers at the time, ranging from the fairly reasonable to the utterly absurb. One student commented that this long, drawn-out list of responsibilities women were expected to fulfill sounded like this guy had just walked into a hardware store and was listing off all the things he wanted his new multi-purpose tool to be able to do, and this other kid blurted out, "It's a Swiss Army WIFE!"

6th Pd.: My 9th graders. Not nearly as witty. We're reading a story about two guys named Georg Znaeym and Ulrich von Gradwitz who live in the Carpathian Mountains. So we have this long discussion about they're located in Eastern/Central Europe, and how you can pretty much tell where they are by their names, anyway, even if you couldn't tell by the blatant footnote explaining where the Carpathian Mountains are located.

10 minutes later, Max calmly says, "Ms. Snow, they're Indians, huh?"

I look at him in utter disbelief. I respond, "They're not Indian. They're in the Carpathian Mountains. And look at their names."

"Maybe they immigrated." (and he's dead serious)

"Really. Indians? To Central Europe?"

"I bet they took a boat."

Such an awful line of reasoning, on so many different levels.

The only excuse I can make for him is that he totally spaced out during our little class discussion, and when he read about two men running around in a forest, he automatically thought, "Oh. A forest. They must be Indians. Of course!"