Bad vs. Good Student Stories (Wayne Booth Response Part 2)

Why do we always want to talk about bad student stories?

I suspect it's because bad students are funny, while good students just are--or some such thing.

Seeing as I just got an e-mail from a summer student that bugged the living heck out of me, I'm going to share some GOOD teaching/student stories instead, just to even out things a bit. Of course, this is probably also going to be quite dull in comparison to my bad student stories, which is a shame.

Story 1:
Imagine a 40 something mother of a few, lives in Taylor, is learning to use a computer as part of going back to school. Things in my class are going great, she's learning everything she needs to, and overall we're getting along swell.
Of course, she constantly complained about her math class (the teacher was let go at the end of the semester, so it wasn't like she was complaining for no good reason!) Finally, she came in one day and just said she needed help. I'm certified to teach the class she was in--so why not?
We sat down and it turned out her instructor had given her a sheet about the metric system, but had given her no other information. They were to have a quiz the next day and she had never seen the information before--that hurts. I had no teaching math tools with me, and honestly felt a little prepared. But me? I've never learned the "English" system of measurement, so this stuff was cake, right?
So I take a half drank bottle of Squirt(r) and a nickle (all I had in my purse, it was one of those terms) and we start talking about how many nickles would go into a bottle of Squirt and so on. It *worked.* It worked really well. She aced her quiz the next day and came into class later that week absolutely glowing.
*Cool.*

Story 2:
It was my first semester teaching, and as I've told some people before, I was doing okay--but I still felt like the person that hadn't bothered to say their name the first day of class. I finally got around to assigning a big group project on audience and comic books and redesigning documents for different media and new audiences... and it ended in skits (or movies, or whatever... they had to pick something visual/oral, in any case...)
So I walk into my classroom and the entire room has been transformed. The students in one group worked over time to paint and build "sets" out of old cardboard boxes they had moved in with, had costumes, you name it. I was completely blown away by how creative different groups had gotten with the project. Actually, that project continued to wow me until I stopped teaching at Tech. Every term I saw something new: sock puppets, flash movies, etc. and every term I came out of that project feeling like we had actually DONE something.