Welcome back to the Learn English podcast, the podcast teaching English in context so you can learn naturally.
If this is your first time listening to the podcast, welcome.
You might not know anything about me, but I am a TESL -certified English teacher.
I teach English online to students who are learning as a second language, and I've been doing that for the past three years.
However, in my normal full -time job, my normal job, I also teach high school.
I am in the United States, I am specifically in California, and I teach high school students who are usually around 14 to 18 years old.
I live in California, and because it's the month of August, that means that we are back to school.
Now, I did an episode before about when the school year starts here in the United States, but I can say that my school always starts the second week of August.
And because we're back in school, we're back to teaching, I'm back in the classroom, I wanted to go over school -inspired vocabulary.
What are some idioms?
What are some slang terms that we use when we're talking about school?
And even when we're not in school, but we use these terms to describe something that's occurring in daily life.
We're going to talk about these idioms and phrases, so if you're interested, if you want to learn more about the difference between a teacher's pet and a class clown, or what it's like to ace it when school is in session, follow along, pay attention, because we're about to get started.
Before we begin, I just want to remind you to look at the description of this podcast for the vocabulary list of the words and phrases that I use along with their definition.
Take the words that you don't know, put them into your vocabulary learning system, start learning them, and start using them in conversation yourself.
Now, let's start talking about these idioms and phrases that are inspired by school.
Of course, you can use them when you are in school yourself, but you can use them out of school as well.
I want to start with the different types of students that we have in class.
The first one that we're going to talk about is the teacher's pet.
Now if you think of this phrase, the two words that are in it are teacher and pet.
A pet is an animal that you have, like a cat, a dog, a fish, something that you have as your pet that you give a lot of attention to and you have affection for.
So a teacher's pet is a student who is the favorite of the teacher.
A teacher's pet is usually not a good thing.
You don't want to be called a teacher's pet.
People usually say this when they are annoyed with someone because that person is being overly nice to the teacher.
They're being extremely flattering, which means they're giving a lot of compliments.
They're being very nice.
They're very eager to please the teacher.
They're always participating and volunteering and raising their hand, and they're just trying a little bit too hard.
People see that they get a little annoyed and they call the person a teacher's pet.
Usually don't want to be called that.
It's usually a put down.
It's usually something that's not said to be a nice thing, but that's what a teacher's pet is.
Now, someone who is very opposite of this is a class clown.
A clown is someone who dresses up, who has face paint, who does things for humor, and the class that we're talking about here is the classroom, the class at the school.
A class clown is the person who is loud, who jokes around all of the time, and who's usually very distracting.
I tend to like the class clowns in my class, the students who have a bit of humor, but sometimes it is a little bit annoying if someone is always making jokes and always wanting to be the center of attention because it distracts from the lesson.
You might have had a class clown when you were in school.
I definitely had a class clown when I was a student and I've seen a lot of class clowns since I've been a teacher, but this is usually the person who wants to make jokes, wants to make everyone laugh.
Everything is a joke to this person.
They're always trying to find humor, but more specifically, they always want the attention on themselves.
That's where the distracting part comes in because it's hard to teach, it's hard to focus on a lesson when someone is always doing something to try to make other people laugh.
Now, I will say as a stereotype, it's usually a boy who is the class clown, usually the person who's trying to get the attention is a young male.
Not always, but that is the stereotype.
People usually do like the class clown.
The teacher's pet is the person who kind of gets put down for being annoying.
The class clown of course can be annoying, but usually people find that person funny and they're enjoying what that person is doing.
A third type of student is a straight A student.
You'll hear this a lot, especially when you are a teacher, I would say, talking about your students.
If you have someone who is very smart, who gets everything done, who does well on all of the exams, that person is usually a straight A student.
In the United States, our grading system is based on letters.
So we have A, B, C, D, and F.
An A is the highest grade, that's the best grade that you can do, that's the top grade that you can get, and then it goes down from there.
A B is good, a C is supposed to be considered average, so the average student, that would usually be a C.
D is not good, and then F is failing.
So you don't get any credit if you get an F in the class.
That means you failed the class and you would have to retake that class, you don't get any credit.
Because of this grading system, an A is the best mark that you can get.
So if someone is a straight A student, that means they only get As.
They only get the best grade possible, and they get that in all of their classes.
I will say I was this person, I was the straight A student, I had As in all of my classes in high school.
I have straight A students every year, I have students who are straight A students, I have one right now who is a very intense straight A student who works very hard and makes sure that he knows everything, and he does everything, and does well on everything, and that is a straight A student.
If someone is a straight A student, and if they get all As in their classes, you might also hear the terms, head of the class, and top of the class.
What this is referring to is when we rank students based on their grades.
When we do this, we have a ranking, so it's the total amount of students and then what position that person is in.
For example, let's say that there are 500 students in the senior class.
These are the students who are about to graduate, they have one year left of high school before they move on to college or university or whatever it is that they decide to do after high school.
If there's 500 students, we rank them and based on their grades, they get a number.
The number one student has the best grades and the 500th student has the worst grades, the worst out of anyone in that class, and that's the ranking.
The people who are at the head of the class or the top of the class, what that means is they're at the top of the list.
They have the best grades, they're at the top of the ranking, so they are at the top of their class or the head of the class.
If you think of a person, how our body is, our head is the highest point of our body, is at the top of our body, so those two terms are interchangeable.
Because we have this grading system that uses letters A through F, we also have a term that is aced it.
What that refers to is when you do really well on something.
This is a term that you'll hear in school, but it's also a term that you can hear out of school that is inspired by a school, but you can hear in everyday conversation.
What it's usually referring to is some type of exam or test, some type of project, some type of responsibility that you have to do.
If you do really well on it, what you will hear is that people will say that you aced it.
You aced it. The it is referring to whatever the task was that you had to do, and then the aced part means that you would have gotten an A on it, that you did a really good job on it.
Let's say you are in school.
Let's say you're taking a test and you get a 95 % out of 100.
You did really well.
That would be an A grade on the exam.
When you get your exam, you look at your score and you say, hey, I aced that.
I aced it. I aced that exam.
That means you did really well.
Now, that's a school example, but of course, we can apply that to something else.
Let's say that you are getting your driver's license and you need to go take your exam and you need to go drive the car with the person who's evaluating you and seeing if you're able to get a license.
You get in the car.
You do really well.
The person said you did a perfect job and you're getting your driver's license.
You can say, hey, I aced it.
I aced my driving exam.
This can also be applied to business.
Let's say you're doing a presentation at work, you're working on a project, you're doing a presentation in front of clients, and you do great.
The clients love you.
They decide to sign up with your company.
Your boss looks at you and said, hey, good job.
You aced it. You did really good on your presentation, and the clients loved you.
That means that you aced the presentation.
Those are some words and phrases dealing with high -achieving students, students who get all A's and who do really well and end up at the top of their class.
People who don't like going to class, who avoid going to class, what we say is that they cut class.
Now, cut is usually something you do with a pair of scissors.
Let's say you take a piece of paper and a pair of scissors.
You would cut the paper with the scissors.
That's not what we're really referring to here.
When we're saying that someone is cutting class, what it means is that they're skipping class.
Instead of going to the classroom instead of learning, they are leaving campus maybe or maybe they're just wandering around schools in the hallways and walking for the class period instead of actually going into class.
There's a lot of students at my school who do that.
I don't know why, but they do.
Those students, we would say they're cutting class.
They're avoiding going into the classroom.
They should be in the class.
They should be learning, but instead they're doing something else.
They're wandering in the hallways.
They're at home. They're going out to eat with their friends.
That's cutting class.
How you know class time is about to begin is based on bells.
We have bells at our school that make a sound.
The students hear a warning bell about two minutes before the class begins, and then when it's time for class to begin, there's another bell.
When class ends, there's a final bell.
This has brought about the saying, saved by the bell.
You might have heard the saying because there was a popular TV show in the 90s called Saved by the Bell, and it was about students who were in high school.
The saying means that the bell rings and it saves you.
Let's say that you're in class, and the teacher is asking you a question.
You don't know the answer.
You should know the answer.
You were supposed to do the assignment, but you don't.
You don't know what's happening.
You don't know what to say, and then the bell rings, and class is out.
That means that you were saved by the bell.
The bell rang. Class is over.
You get to go leave, and you were saved from embarrassment.
It saved you, which means that it ended whatever troubling thing was going on, in this case, not being able to answer the teacher's questions.
The bell ringing, let class out, and stopped that line of questioning.
You were saved by the bell.
I have definitely been saved by the bell in my time.
I've had a presentation due one time that I forgot about, and thankfully, the students who were presenting before me took a lot of time.
The bell rang. Class was over, and I got an extra day to work on my presentation that I had forgotten about.
In that case, I was definitely saved by the bell.
Let's talk about studying.
When we're talking about studying and doing homework and reading, what we can say is that you are cracking the books.
Cracking usually means that something is breaking apart.
Think of an egg. If you want to open up an egg, you crack the shell.
You hit the shell and break it apart.
When we're talking about cracking open the books, what that means is opening the books and reading them.
You'll hear this when people say, I got to go crack the books open tonight.
That means I got to go study tonight.
I got to go take my textbook.
I have to open it. I have to read because I have some type of assignment or exam that's due.
You can also say hit the books.
Crack open the books.
Hit the books means the same thing.
I know the word hit means to strike something, to strike an object with some type of force.
We're not actually hitting our books.
We're not slapping our books or punching them, but we're opening them up and studying.
If someone says, hey, I need to hit the books tonight.
I have an exam tomorrow.
Just saying that they need to study.
Sometimes if you put off studying too long, that means that you procrastinated.
So procrastination is not unique to school.
You'll hear it with school.
People will say that they procrastinated or you'll hear from teachers, don't procrastinate.
What that means is don't put things off.
Don't put things off till the last minute.
Instead, do it ahead of time.
You can use this outside of school.
People procrastinate about everything.
They procrastinate at work.
They procrastinate on doing chores around their house.
They put things off for the last minute.
And then they have to rush to try to get everything done.
During that time when they're rushing, that is crunch time.
So crunch time, if someone says it's crunch time, that means that it is the time where you really have to work now.
You have to really try and get everything done because things are due soon and you do not have enough time to get them done.
Crunch time is the time where you have to work.
You have to put in the effort.
You can no longer procrastinate and you're just hoping to get it done.
If you're doing this with a test, that is called cramming.
So let's say you have a test that's tomorrow and you didn't study at all.
And now you know you have to study all day to try to pass that test tomorrow.
You would say that you are cramming for the test.
So if someone is cramming, that means they're trying to fit in as much information into their brain in the shortest amount of time.
They only have a very little bit of time to study and they're trying to force all of the information that they can in.
And that is cramming.
Now sometimes those cramming sessions go all night long.
Sometimes you have to stay awake all night instead of sleeping.
So you can cram and you can try to study as much as possible.
If you do that, that is called pulling an all nighter.
The study session is taking place overnight.
So that's why it's called a nighter and it's taking all night.
So it's an all nighter, pulling an all nighter.
Oh man, I have definitely pulled a few all nighters in my day.
I didn't ever do it in high school, but at university, I had to one time, we had a lab report that was supposed to be about 30 pages, 30, 30 pages long.
It took forever to write.
It was horrible. And that was my first ever all nighter.
I was up all night trying to finish this stupid lab report that took forever to do.
And I was exhausted, but I printed it at about 750 in the morning.
I walked to my class.
My class started at eight.
I turned it in and they let us leave because they knew all of us were exhausted.
They knew all of us had probably pulled an all nighter to finish this insane lab report.
And so they were very kind.
They had us turn in our papers and then we all got to go home and go to sleep because we were exhausted.
You can use this of course it with school and with papers and studying for exams, but you can also use it outside of school.
If you have a presentation for work, if you have something that you have to do with your house or your car, anything that's not related to school, but something that's forcing you to stay up all night that you have to work on, that would still be an all nighter, pulling an all nighter because you have some
responsibility, something you have to do, and it has to get done by the next day.
I hope you learned a little bit about some school inspired vocabulary.
School is always an important part in everyone's life.
It's a long time that we spend in school and it's a big part of my life, I'm there every day, nearly every day.
And because of that, we do get these school inspired sayings, these slang terms, these things that we use when we're talking about school and that transfer to other parts of our lives.
So I hope you learned a little bit about that so you can understand a native speaker when they say it to you and so that you can use it in conversation.
If you missed anything, just a reminder to look at the description of this episode.
You will find the vocabulary list of these phrases there so you can take them, put them into your vocabulary learning system and learn them to improve your English vocabulary.
If you liked this episode, if you liked learning about these different phrases and sayings, please let me know.
There's other vocabulary specific terms that we can use.
We can go over vocabulary for different things.
But I don't know if you want those episodes unless you tell me.
So please leave a comment below.
Tell me if you liked this and what other specific vocabulary you would like to cover.
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