Your decision to enter the education field - CBEST Essay pratice

I was getting bored with all the serious essay so I tried to write a funny one to amuse myself.

Roland

What particular experience had the greatest impact on your decision to enter the education field? Explain why that particular experience was so important.

I was working in a bakery making donut holes but I always wanted to be a teacher. A teacher of intelligent children. One single event galvanizing me to make the decision run off to be a teacher.

I have four children who I have been helping them do their homework since they started school. Helping my children with school work which was extremely difficult and trying experience. As an example my youngest daughter, who is a complete ninny and yahoo, took months to even learn her ABCs and she was in seventh grade. I had to help that blockhead do all her home work no matter how simple the assignment. What can I say, besides being ugly, she is about as smart as a brick. A real dim wit! My son is even more stupid, which is really hard to imagine. It took me weeks just to train him to shut the front door during the winter, even though he was in eighth grade. I longed for severely to mildly retarded children who would be much more capable learners than my children. I dreamed of children who had enough brains to could walk and talk at the same time.

One day in June everything changed for me. I got the chance to help normal children learn mathematics. This turned out to be the milestone in my decision to become a teacher. I was amazed at how fast normal children could learn. You could explain a new a topic, show them one example and they understood, the first time. That was the day I realized that I wanted to work with children where were normal, and not block heads, yahoos and absolute dim wits like my children.

I wanted to be a teacher of intelligent, nice children. It was extremely invigorating because the children had so much potential. I wanted better student than my worthless, no good children were and now I had found them. The very next day I ran away from home to be a teacher, someplace far away.

This isn't all that funny. Your best line is this:


Your main problem, though, is that you are writing an essay that sort of satirizes the narrator's children, rather than the motivations of people who go into teaching. It is sort of amusing that someone would go in to teaching to deal with kids smarter than his own, but you could definitely make this funnier with a bit of effort.

Sean, you sound like Mustafa!

This just proves the maxim that humor is a matter of taste. I found the essay amusing in a light-hearted way. You weren't trying to write a side-splitting comedic essay, just have some fun within the essay form. I, for one, appreciated the break from the usual routine. If you're writing these essays just for practice in English punctuation and sentence structure, why not have some fun with the content?

Speaking of punctuation and grammar, here's a fix:

One single event galvanized me to make the decision to run off to be a teacher.

Nonsense. I didn't say it was an utterly humorless piece that made the reader wonder why he wasted his time perusing it. I just said it wasn't that funny. Slightly amusing, in fact. Which I think is pretty much the same as "amusing in a light-hearted way." So please, knock off the gratuitous insults :-)

I would have to agree. I didn't find it all that funny. It is a little hard to tell if the narrator is using hyperbole or if his seventh-grade daughter was really incapable of learning her alphabet. Calling her ugly isn't flying with me either. If the narrator were to lament that his teenage daughter was incapable of responding to a simple stimulus, like the ringing of the telephone, unless it was the ringtone on her phone, it would sit better with me. It comes closer to the mark with the son's inability to shut the door . . . things that normal parents complain about with their children. Retarded is another one of those words that throws off the humor. "Developmentally delayed," "mentally challenged," or naming the disorder--Down Syndrome--have replaced the word retarded.

I do like the last sentence though. My mom frequently threatens to run away. Instead of running away to be a teacher, she claims that she is headed to Belize.

Here I have to disagree -- nothing kills satire faster than adherence to political correct norms and a desire to avoid giving offense.

"I longed for mildly retarded children who would be much more capable learners than my own." is actually sort of funny.

"I longed for mildly mentally challenged children who would be much more capable learners than my own." is not.

The sort of humor you are trying here should involve high levels of satire and irony. It should also, like any essay, have a point. That point should itself be meaningful, and preferably something that your core audience would identify with. Thinking that your children are stupid doesn't meet either of these criteria, which is why the essay fails to be particularly amusing.

By now you have probably realized that humor is highly subjective. What is funny to one person may be dull and insipid to another. However, when all three of your reviewers agree that the essay falls into the "not that funny" to "vaguely amusing" category, you can probably do better.

Thanks all for your comments.

I was trying for small amount of levity in what I though was a rather heavily used topic. It seems the consensus is don't send this to Saturday night live and keep my day job.

For the record my daughter is quite lovely and has a four point zero average.

I wasn't suggesting that the word retarded be replaced with mentally challenged for the purpose of this essay. You're right, mentally challenged isn't funny either--indeed, it is less humorous. Retarded, because it used to apply to a more clearly-defined group of people, just isn't funny in my book. Polish jokes were common a couple of decades ago, but calling her a Pollock would fall flat in the humor department as well. It is true that I was brought up in the era of political correctness and I am sure that has a lot to do with what words make me uncomfortable. The line between what is funny and what is offensive can be rather thin as well as subjective.

Bruce Cameron gets away with making fun of his kids because he generally tackles their actions and not their innate attributes. Generally insults, the ones that are funny at least, fly between people who are on equal social footing. A parent (a teacher, a Little League coach, a priest) calling a child an idiot is a bit harsh. That same adult saying that a child did an idiotic thing sits better. I think that this essay could have been more humorous if the reader were shown how the kids were acting like idiots . . . I liked the example of closing the door.

Roland, you very well could make a good Saturday Night Live writer. Their writers push the envelope of comfort quite often. You did bring levity to a heavily used topic. I think that our discussion here on what makes something funny (and things that can make some readers uncomfortable), is a reminder to write for the audience. If you are writing for Saturday Night Live, you can be irreverent and rude. Admission officers and scholarship committees, on the other hand, often lack a sense of humor. I am glad that you shared your essay here.

Here's a writing challenge: Who would like to try to collaboratively write a very funny essay using Roland's premise of the donut maker who runs away to be a teacher?

I'm not so sure: Mark Twain wrote several humorous essays in the first person voice of a wrong-headed narrator. This may not be the kind of humor you appreciate (it's not my favorite either), but we cannot flatly say that it's not funny or doesn't work. Within American literature in particular, I believe there is a tradition of this kind of humorous essay. David Sedaris sometimes writes purportedly funny essays in the New Yorker in this vein. I find them insufferable but, obviously, somebody finds them funny.

According to the principle of constructive criticism wherein one owns one's opinions, all that we can say about a piece of humor is "it's not funny to me" or "it doesn't work for me." For example, I cannot abide the pratfall-based humor so popular on British TV. The comedian Jerry Lewis sickens rather than amuses me, but French audiences find him hilarious. Unlike punctuation, humor is largely a matter of taste. So, I think, when critiquing humor, it's especially important to be circumspect.