Cake Wrecks, World Educator
June 3, 2009 I thought you guys might appreciate this e-mail I got today:
Hi Jen,
A friend of mine posted a link to your site, (and) I think I spent about 3 hours yesterday going though your blog when I was supposed to be working on lesson plans for the English class I teach. I am an American English teacher at a big elementary school not far from Seoul, South Korea. My Korean coworkers heard me laughing so hard that they came over to my desk to investigate. Clever as I am, I told them I was working on my next lesson, which I wasn't... until I realized that I WAS!
So today, I decided to ditch the book and instead teach grammar and spelling mistakes from Cake Wrecks. The fourth and fifth graders loved it, and the students were able to correct about 90% of the mistakes! How embarrassing that even Korean elementary school students know better!
Thanks for the great teaching material!
- Carolyn H.
The Cake Wrecks pop quiz - gotta love it.
Here the children are wondering how the U.S. ever became a world power.
(The answer, of course, is Whoopie Pies.)
Carolyn, thanks for helping to spread the Wreckage on such a global scale. Why, by influencing these young minds you've made our bid for ultimate Wrecky world domination that much easier! Tell me, did you perchance introduce the kiddos to their friendly neighborhood Carrot Jockeys?
Reader Comments (102)
Maybe if we had more great, creative, "think outside the box" teachers like that, there wouldn't be so many wrecks out there!
Finding a teachable moment in cake fails--WIN!!!
So cool, I totally just posted this on my facebook.
Love it!
That's the best idea I've heard about in a long time!
I have to do this when I've finished my degree and am out in Norwegian schools teaching English. Must brainwash children with cake wrecks!
Best teacher ever in the history of ever.
omg! that's great! 8D i wish my english teacher would do something different like this! 8D but then again, she didn't even know what a link was O.o
Ha that is funny!
Love love love this!!
Currently in South Korea and I think this is a wonderful lesson plan as well. None of the cakes I've seen here ever have writing but some are wrecks anyway. Most are quite lovely to look at but you wouldn't want to eat them.
I am also a teacher and just a few weeks ago, I began showing my 6th grade students the Creative Grammar and Mithspellings cakes after we did our grammar warmups. They LOVED THEM! Every day, they'd come in and ask, "Do you have a new cake to show us?" At the end of the year, I made a cakewreck for each class that said, "Kongradulashuns Frist Peroid!" and the other "6st Peroid." It was a hit. Thanks for the material.
Back when we started it all (the U.S.), spelling wasn't necessarily standardized - at least not like it is supposed to be today. I would like to think that we became a world power around the time we started to standardize our own spelling and differentiate ourselves from English from "over the pond". But I don't want to know what that says about our prospects for today... ::shakes head::
What a cool lesson plan, btw!
wv: honisch. Honisch, I've been reading far to much muttsh cartoonsh.
Mow that they're destroying the minds of innocent Korean children, I guess we can classify these cakes as WMDs:
wrecks of mysterious deliciousness?
Wait.... does that school have cherry cabinets?!
Awesome!
Haiku Joy's comment made me bust a gut.
I'd never heard of Whoopie Pies, they don't have them here in Australia, so I guess your world domination is not yet complete :D We do, however, know all about Whoopie Cushions. I originally thought that a Whoopie Pie was a disturbing sort of follow-on.
Word Verification: woredgie - kind of a worrying wedgie. Possibly related to Whoopie Pies.
This is HILARIOUS! What a fantastic teacher!
That's so cool Jen. Not only have you gone global, but you're educating the world one English student at a time.
I'm an ESL teacher in China, and I'd love to do something like that with my kids.
Unfortunately, cake wrecks is blocked by the Chinese internet. At least in Wuhan it is. Maybe there's something subversive I don't know about going on here?
I can only access the site because I have a proxy server. As soon as I log out of it, or if I'm on a public computer, not cakewrecks for me.
Chi, you'll have to print out the wrecks and then make overheads or something. Then, all the wreckage goodness is available to all!!
Wait, did I just have an idea that wll get you sent to subversive jail for bypassing government sponsored filters? Nevermind. No carrot jockey, no matter how spectacular, is worth jailtime.....
Nice! I am a teacher in a school in Japan and I love this idea! Mind if I steal it? Or I can lesson trade you.
Awesome! I'm American but in elementary school I would have loved Cake Wrecks for a lesson. (heck, any excuse to look at Cake Wrecks rocks!)
How awesome. And I agree, what's with the fantastic classroom? If our classrooms in America looked like that, maybe our kids would know how to spell!
Best. thing. ever.
That is adorable! What a great idea -- though I hope there was cake at the end of the test as an incentive...
That is so cool!!
Real life is so much more interesting than dry dusty old books!
That is SO cool Jen!
That is FANTASTIC!!!
That's effin awesome! Jen you are so effin awesome!
That is an awesome idea! I've passed this post along to several educators ... have to spread good ideas like this one!!
Careful. Without stupid people, this site wouldn't exist and we wouldn't have our daily laugh. 3 cheers for stupity!
That's awesome!
So incredibly cool!
This is funny because I do the same thing with my tenth grade English students and half the time, they CAN'T find the errors! I put cake wrecks up on my SMARTboard every few days, when there are grammar/spelling errors. The kids think you are as funny as I do! Keep the errors comming; I am saving them up over the summer!
Amber
What a great teacher!! Love it!
This was a great idea and I'm soooo stealing it! I start teaching advanced English comp for ESL students in the fall, and I've been looking for a nice, light-hearted intro lesson so I don't panic on my first day in the college classroom. Thanks a bunch!
Man.... the only way I ever got to do grammar was out of a stupid old textbook.
What a cool teacher!!
I am an English teacher in South Korea as well. I love that idea for a lesson!
I am totally stealing that idea for my (future) English classroom. Very cool idea!
That's so cool you mentioned whoopie pies. I work in a bakery in California that makes them and I spend a good chunk of my day explaining what they are!
This is simply awesome.
Jen -- I love this! I think photos and blogs are sometimes more fun/effective teaching tools vs. just explaining the difference between "you're" and "your."
There's a bad grammar blog (forgetting the name, I am) with nothing but photos of bad grammar (ex: "Franks Tire's) that I used in my business writing class, and it was lovely -- they got it with the photos.
that is awesome and hilarious!!
This is the most awesome thing I've ever heard. You totally rock!
Aw, so awesome! I wish that I'd had a class like that when I was in elementary school. I'm sure some of my college level courses could use a wreck infusing too.
alright...I live in S.Korea too. So a couple of things:
The classroom is awesome, probably because it's not a public school...it's probably a school kids go to after school that their parents pay bum loads of money to send them to. I've worked in lots of public schools here and they're not nice at all...maybe Seoul's different.
Also, if you want to see a cake wreck perhaps it's time for me to send in some photos of some Korean cakes...two words:cherry tomatoes, yeah, i said it...in Korea tomatoes really are a fruit.
Hey,
I am a fond reader from Singapore and I happen to be a teacher too. I was teaching my students the proper use of punctuation marks and I used some of the pictures from your site. My children really enjoyed that lesson and many were laughing at the mistakes made.
Thanks Cake Wrecks!
Congrats! You have a blog with a ton of readers of varying ages (I'm 13, proof), a BOOK, and people in other countries read your blog. You're officially famous.
I almost died laughing at the caption on the last pic- but it wasn't Whoopies Pies only, it was the great American Fried Twinkie too. ;)
I love that! I'll be teaching an English class about 2 hours from Seoul starting in September and I've been wondering about how to work on grammar. Sounds like a hilariously fun thing to do!
Oh so cool! I teach middle school English and have used your site for grammar lessons too! The kids LOVE it. It makes me feel like I'm helping the world by ensuring that my students won't ever end up on your site- they'll know better! :)
- Taylor
This post is wonderful.