When your year nines struggle with their timestables you worry that you're doing your job wrong. But that's easy to sort out, they'll learn their tables eventually but I'd have a nightmare teaching a subject like science when you have to get across actual ideas.
We were in a computer 'room' which is on the top floor of our atrium. Two girls were looking up through the glass roof at the clouds: 'sir we're moving'. Well I suppose Copernicus wouldn't argue with that, but they were basing this on the movement of the clouds across the sky, as though the clouds themselves were stationary.
'If we stop we'll fall off the world because then we won't get to be on top anymore.' I put on a science teacher's metaphorical cap and asked if we were only staying on the ground because of being on top of the world then how come people in Australia weren't floating off into space. This was because they get a turn on top eventually, hence the problems it would cause if the world stopped moving.
'So it's nothing to do with gravity?' I ask them.
'Gravity's there to stop the air floating away.' Which is kind of true.
Later they told me we'd stopped and were going to fly into space soon. I'm still waiting for this but I was actually quite impressed with how they'd thought the whole thing through.
