BEST TEACHER EVER

A teacher, Mrs. Peterson, was leading her class through a lesson on fractions. She noticed young Johnny seemed to be staring out the window, completely lost in his own world. Determined to bring him back to the lesson, she decided to use a bit of playful math.

“Johnny,” she began, her voice ringing through the classroom, “If there are three ducks sitting peacefully on a fence – a nice, sturdy, wooden fence – and you, let’s say, hypothetically shoot one with a pop gun, how many ducks would be left?”

Johnny, startled back to reality, thought for a moment. He pictured the three ducks, perhaps mallards with their green heads gleaming in the sun, perched on the fence. “None,” he finally replied.

“None?” Mrs. Peterson raised an eyebrow. “Why none, Johnny?”

“Because,” Johnny explained, a hint of a grin spreading across his face, “the loud bang from the pop gun would scare all the ducks away! They’d take flight immediately!”

Mrs. Peterson chuckled. “Well, Johnny, the textbook answer is two. But I appreciate your creative thinking. You’re looking at the bigger picture, considering the ducks’ reactions, not just the simple subtraction. I like how you’re thinking!”

Johnny, emboldened by her positive response, decided to turn the tables. “Mrs. Peterson,” he asked, “If you see three women strolling out of an ice cream parlor, each enjoying their treat in a different way – one is delicately licking her ice cream cone, another is enthusiastically sucking her ice cream, and the third is happily biting into her ice cream sandwich – which one of the three is married?”

Mrs. Peterson paused, a thoughtful expression on her face. This was a bit of a trick question, she suspected. She considered the options. The woman licking her cone seemed cautious, perhaps a bit reserved. The woman sucking her ice cream seemed…well, Johnny was right, there was something about that image. The woman biting into her ice cream sandwich seemed the most carefree. “The one sucking her ice cream?” she guessed, a slight question in her voice.

Johnny grinned triumphantly. “Nope!” he declared. “The one with the wedding ring! But I like how you’re thinking!”

The class erupted in laughter, and even Mrs. Peterson had to smile. Johnny, it seemed, had learned a valuable lesson that day – not just about fractions, but also about thinking outside the box and the importance of a well-placed joke.