ABITUR COUNTDOWN – not to be taken too seriously!

How To Annoy Your Teacher ... and lower your grade in tests (www.jochen-lueders.de)

The following 25 time-tested methods of irritating your teacher and persuading him or her to deduct points are guaranteed to work for you, too. How many of the methods do you already use?

1.        Do not give any clues of identification, like e.g. your name and the question number.

2.        Do not read all the tasks/questions before you start working. Quickly scan the text and then start immediately with the first question.

3.        Teachers just love repetitions that’s why you should repeat yourself as often as possible (“As I already said before ...”).

4.        Do not leave any blank lines between the different tasks and answers. Your whole test should be one long block of text; like this you will save a lot of paper and thus help the forests.

5.        Never put additons to an answer close to the answer itself. In general your answers should consist of two sentences and the additons should be at least three sentences.

6.        Try to make as many additions as possible. Do not mark your additions so that your teacher experiences a happy surprise when he suddenly discovers something on the last page that belongs to your first answer.

7.        An alternative is to mark all your additions with the asterisk *. Do not use any clear marks like superscript numbers1, they would spoil the fun of working out which addition belongs to which answer.

8.        Do not answer the different parts of a question in the given order. Always start with the last one and only then jump to the first one.

9.        Write across the margins so the teacher has no space for comments.

10.    Write illegibly. If you can’t, your handwriting should be as tiny as possible.

11.    If you are not sure how to spell a word, simply write your second version over the first one. This method is especially efficient with vowels. Your teacher just loves to find out whether it is supposed to be an ‘a’, an ‘o’ or maybe a ‘u’.

12.    Do not stick to the point. Don’t even say what the point is. Just waffle on about anything that comes to your mind.

13.    Do not reveal the source of any of your conclusions, interpretations etc. Never ever give any line numbers, they would spoil the teacher’s fun to search for the passage you might refer to.

14.    Do not use any quotation marks. Let the teacher find out himself whether you used your own words or not.

15.    If a quotation doesn’t fit into your sentence, simply change it. If necessary just leave out unnecessary words like not.

16.    Do not begin a new paragraph for a new aspect, argument etc. It is so much more entertaining for the teacher to work that out himself.

17.    Under no circumstances indent the first line of a new paragraph. Make sure that the last line of the previous paragraph goes to the very right margin.

18.    Do not bother to provide transitions and signal words. Simply connect all your sentences with And.

19.    Include plenty of clichés and avoid any alternatives to good and bad.

20.    Either run sentences together without full stops or write sentence fragments or alternate the two forms.

21.    Keep shuffling back and forth between present and past tense, even within the same sentence.

22.    Make sure your pronouns do not refer to anything or anyone in particular.

23.    Sprinkle dots everywhere.

24.    Do not do any revising or proofreading. This would be sure to raise the grade.

25.    Never ever use your ALD or DCE! When you come across an unknown word, just look out of the window and guess its meaning. When you are not sure how to use a word, stare at the ceiling and speculate.

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