Something I'm learning as a teacher is that a good deal of the time when a student raises his/her hand, something comes out that has ABSOLUTELY NOTHING to do with the topic of conversation. It's gotten to the point that with one of my students, I've started using the phrase, "Is this relevant?" before I let her answer questions.
Now I know I should be there to allow their creativity to flow, and a big part of their job as students is to learn how to express themselves and their ideas. However, a girl in my class that has to tell me she "got Mexican stickers today" or the kid who says "power bracelets really do work cause that guy at the mall tried to push me over when I was wearing it and he couldn't" is not really a part of my lesson plan. We have a lot to accomplish in 50 minutes, and I'm not sure that it's vital that we all find out that "the lifespan of a clone is shorter than the thing its cloned from."
When do I let the non-sequiturs in and when do I stop them? Sometimes its nice to take a break from teaching to listen to this stuff, but I mostly don't want to spend our time learning that a kid's "Spanish name" is "Pablo Pepper."
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