For Better or For Worse by Lynn Johnston for November 12, 2012

I never had my hand up, and I always got called on.

I only ever got called for the questions I didn’t know the answer to.

Guy doesn’t look pleased.

I would raise my hand every time, then the teacher would say – I know YOU know the answer, I need to call on someone else.

If you want to be called upon, look bored, distracted, or out of it. Then you will be called upon and you can smugly give the right answer. After awhile, you will never be called upon at all, as Poollady points out.

I had an English teacher who would assign homework – say, 30 sentences to diagram – and the next day would call on each student to come up to the blackboard and diagram one of the sentences. Everyone else would go to the blackboard with their sheet of paper in hand, and diagram the sentence, correctly or not. I’d go to the board, without a sheet of paper, and diagram mine – always correctly.

I suspect, the teacher knew I wasn’t doing the homework… but also knew I didn’t need to.

As a teacher, I of course did this trick, mixing it up between the kids who knew and the kids who weren’t paying attention. As a student, I did the trick mentioned above. My favourite was to either knit or read in classes. It made it much harder to answer questions and therefore more fun.