“My wife is a retired teacher and she has some real zingers”.
I’m a retired college professor and I also have some real zingers. I think my favorite was in trying to get a computer hardware and architecture class to design a circuit that could perform the binary addition tables (0 + 0 = 0, 0 + 1 = 1, 1 + 0 = 1, and 1 + 1 = 10). I went on to say that if we could build such a circuit, we could do any addition problem. I then drew the analogy of learning the addition tables in first grade. I said that this was quite a job learning everything from 0 + 0 = 0 through 9 + 9 = 18 and while we had to learn 100 addition facts to do addition in decimal, the computer only has to do four addition facts in binary. I told them that in first grade, we would come into class off the school bus, drill on the addition table for two hours, then go out for recess and have a smoke and a cup of coffee before coming back in and drilling some more. At the end of the class period, a female graduate student came up to me and said “Did they really let you smoke when you were in first grade?”