TIL my history students thought "the Great Depression" was just a sad mood for three weeks

I was teaching a unit on the 1930s to my high school sophomores last March and asked them to write a paragraph about how the Depression affected families. One student turned in a paper about "people feeling really down and staying in bed" and I nearly lost it, turns out half the class thought it was a psychological term. Has anyone else had a lesson completely derailed by a weird student misunderstanding?

2 comments

2 Comments

baker.simon2d agoTop Commenter

Hang on, wait. A whole paragraph about "people feeling really down and staying in bed"? I'm not even mad, that's kind of impressive in its own way. Like, how does a whole class not catch a single hint from the name "Great Depression" that it was about money and jobs and stuff? Must have been a real wake-up call the day you pulled out the Dorothea Lange photos.

cooper.reese2d ago

Oh man, one kid in my econ class thought "bear market" meant there were actual bears running around Wall Street.