Please Doodle Here…

　　About half of you out there who are reading this right now are saying to yourself, "Wow, he did silly stuff, so what? That doesn't make him a good teacher." And I agree with you.

　　If you go and just make your students laugh for 180 days and don't teach them a thing, you are a good comedian, not a good teacher.

　　But Mr. Henrich's humor had a place in his teaching. It did so many things for his class and for his students in many areas. Motivation, innovation, creativity, and ability were all promoted through his slapstick brand of teaching.

　　In the last section, we already saw the sheer challenge that made up the Henrich tests. Actually, besides critical thinking and challenge, humor was a big part of Mr. Henrich's tests.

　　Everyone knows that writing for two hours straight is just mind numbing, nerve-racking work. No one wants to keep going after about 40 minutes of writing. It is just something that a human's attention span is not made for. But since we had so much information to cover, the test couldn't be shortened or split up. So if you were a teacher how would you make sure that your students didn't just give up on the second half of the test? When you are staring at another hour and half of writing after already writing for an hour, it is the quintessence of the word temptation to just stop and break your pencil and go to sleep. Students feel as though they had crossed a little mound of dirt and still had the Himalayas standing in your way.

　　What was a viable solution to this? Mr. Henrich found the perfect solution. The solution, in fact, was what made the tests so memorable. Even more than the super lengthy questions, it stood out in my mind when I thought of Mr. Henrich's test. I have already shown you that Mr. Henrich was a very silly guy. Comedy ran in his blood. He just had a knack for it. So he figured out that he could use comedy to keep our moral up while we did his goliath sized tests.

　　No, I don't mean he stood up there and told jokes while we took a test. He put the jokes inside of the tests, in the form of questions. The test was very blatantly split upsintostwo sections. The test and the bonus. The test consisted of the lengthy super painful to answer questions that we were supposed to have learned.

　　The bonus section consisted of; you guessed it, Bonus questions. These questions were neither hard nor easy.

　　Bonus questions also had point values they ranged from 3 to infinite. The lower point level bonus questions were usually just little jokes and questions that were just a blast to read.

　　"Where does a park ranger go to‘get out'?"

　　"Why do you park on driveways and drive on parkways?"

　　"Give your opinion on my new haircut."

　　"If you could be any power ranger (a children's show depicting superheroes with individual colors), which color would you be and why?"

　　"If I was a genie (like the Genie Aladdin let out of the lamp, who granted wishes to his savior) and you had one wish, what would you wish for?"

　　"If a bear was to come in the room and start attacking Mr. Henrich, what would you do?"

　　The "infinite questions" had no point value. You get as many points as Mr. Henrich thought you deserved. A couple of the more famous infinite point bonus questions were:

　　"Discuss one life lesson that you have learned in my class this year."

　　"What is your goal in life?"

　　"Who is your greatest role model and why?"

　　As you can see the questions have absolutely nothing to do with the actual information we were learning. They were there for two very important reasons. If you just finished a 30-point question and your mind felt like a big piece of tofu, then just flip to the bonus section and do a question or two. Every time we took a test, throughout the entirety of the class you could always hear students laughing or chuckling as they flipped to the bonus questions. After doing one or two, you could once again approach the daunting test questions with a new found vigor, like a refueled car.

　　I have found the other secret reason they were so important. Simply, the test was incredibly hard. Only about 20 percent of the students were able to finish all of the actual test questions. Of that 20 percent, only about five percent of them actually got all of the information that they wanted to say on the paper. It was sometimes just not possible to write down everything you wanted to say. With this in mind, it wasn't fair to those who weren't as fast a writer as others. They didn't get as much of the test down because of this.

　　This wasswheresyour ability to do bonus questions came in. The bonus questions were graded a little differently. The idea was to come up with an idea that was not only funny, but also clever. Mr. Henrich said that if you could make him laugh out loud, you would get full credit for that question.

　　For a question such as "Why do we park on driveways and drive on parkways?" I remember my response to that bonus question, "Same reason shipments come by truck and cargo comes by air."

　　That got me the full three points. It was just a play on word, which Mr. Henrich gave to us and I answered with one of my own.

　　A better example of cleverness was my answer for the question, "Give your opinion on my new haircut."

　　I wrote, "I don't like writing about tragedies."

　　When I got my test back I found that my score for that question was 4 out of 3 because he said he laughed quite hard when he read that.

　　On the questions that were infinite points, your points were decided by how much Mr. Henrich liked what you put down. You could very well get 1 point for what you wrote. The highest I have ever seen for a bonus question was 15 points. It was mine.

　　That was on the last test of my 8th grade year. I had finished early and sat down to do the "Please doodle here." question. I started to doodle and scribble little pictures all over then suddenly it hit me that this was going to be the last Henrich test that I took, so I decided to do something cool.

　　Out of nowhere, it hit me. In class we often looked at timelines, because it was a part of learning history. The timelines would illustrate important events that happened over some period of time. I decided to turn that around and make a timeline of my two years in Mr. Henrich's class. The timeline grew and grew as I added events to it. I included just about every funny incident that had happened those two yearssintosthe timeline. Things such as "The puppet show", "Crazy hair day", "Rick's Alamo" and specific jokes, funny incidents and happenings were all added to the timeline.

　　When I finished I had a page full of a timeline that made me laugh even as I went back and read what I had written. The "déjàvu" feeling that I got from reading the timeline was really a great feeling.

　　I turned it in and a week later I saw that I got a 123/115 points on the test, because I got 15 points on that one question.

　　Mr. Henrich wrote this exact quote next to that bonus question, "I was just sitting around at home grading tests, then I read this and I started laughing so hard that the neighbors called the police to see if I was alright. Good job!" Pertaining to Mr. Henrich's tests, after a little more reflection about it, I've concluded that frankly, Mr. Henrich didn't focus too hard on the test scores. He knew long before the test who was working and studying and who wasn't. The tests merely provided an opportunity for the students to summarize what they've learned and also created an environment of pressure to test and try our intelligence and endurance.

　　If you were to ask the students of my 7th and 8th grade year which question from Mr. Henrich's tests they remember the most, the unanimous answer would be, "Please doodle here…"

　　This is the most proper example that Mr. Henrich is Mr. Henrich. As silly and nonsensical as this question looks like on the outside, it is actually full of humor, craziness, and intelligence. With this ironic combination of essay long 30-point questions and silly bonus questions, how else could I better describe Mr. Henrich?