About 50 years ago I was living up in Boston, waiting on tables at a long-defunct restaurant and supplementing my meager income with other meager income from acting and performing with local opera companies.
I had a degree from MIT, but it was the Carter Administration, and there were no jobs to be had that could let me leverage my biology degree, or my programming skills I'd picked up before and during college, so I was living on the 1977 equivalent of ramen noodles.
During that time, I had become friends with a fellow named Chip Piatti, who was a teacher and worked in other programs with students, mentoring them and helping them deal with the times. Some of these actually involved high-school students hanging out at MIT, and I never really knew how the programs were affiliated with the school, or if the school even was aware of them. Long story.
Chip was also involved in the local theater community, and was actually the director of the first couple operettas of the Boston Light Opera, the company I cofounded in 1975. He and I had many conversations about life in general -- to be fair, Chip had a lot of such conversations with many people back then about all manner of things.
A number of them involved the classroom. I had never wanted to be a teacher, but while I was a college student I actually did some substitute teaching at my high school during breaks where I was between or before and after semesters. So I understood the environment a bit.
Chip was an actual teacher, and had one fascinating story that I thought I'd share here because it just needed to be preserved for the ages. He passed away, a bit too young, a few years back, and if there's one Chip Piatti story that needs to be age-preserved, this one is it.
He was teaching biology (this would be early 1970s) to a high school class with the usual mix of good and bad students. The topic of the week was plants and photosynthesis and that sort of thing. As a biology major, you'd think I was really familiar with that stuff, but everything I know about those topics was from high school -- my MIT education ignored plants entirely.
But I digress.
So this one day Chip was grading papers, in this case a homework test assignment that included a section on definitions of certain terms regarding plants -- "Here is the word, please give the definition", that sort of thing.
Now, one of the words was "stomata" which, as we all know, is the plural form of the word "stoma." A "stoma" is simply a pore in a leaf that allows the cells in the leaf to take in and release gases -- they take in carbon dioxide and give out oxygen, and the stomata allow those gases to enter and leave the leaf.
So Chip is working on grading the papers, when he gets to the paper of one of the more competent students in the class. He was a bit taken aback to see the following as her answer to one of the definitions:
Stomata Some of these fossilized leaves are so well preserved that the pores sing for the exchange of gases are still intact .
Now, you're probably thinking that you read that wrong. First of all, that's not a sentence. There's a compound prepositional phrase in the middle that doesn't make any sense. Pores do not sing, even when they're exchanging gases. And no matter from how many directions you try to read that, it isn't even the definition of a word; it's a failed attempt at a sentence.
Chip tried turning the paper over, and reading it backward, but it still made no sense. So he shrugged his shoulders, marked it wrong with an "X", and moved on to the rest of the paper, most of which answers were perfectly fine. He might even have forgotten about it.
Except two papers later, he's grading the definitions given by a far-less capable student, when he comes to the following as a definition for the word "stomata":
Stomata Some of these fossilized leaves are so well preserved that the pores sing for the exchange of gases are still intact .
Now, Chip must have arched an eyebrow when he saw that. It was the selfsame answer given by the "good" student, and this guy was a solid "C" when he actually did that well. So it was pretty clear that he had copied off the young lady, which meant that both of them were going to get a zero for their whole test. It didn't explain the bizarre answer, but it did make the grading easy.
That would have been the end of it, except the young lady was not ready to get a zero, and went to see Chip the next day. That conversation went sort of like this:
Girl: "Why did I get a zero?"
Chip: "You cheated. You let someone copy off your paper and this was a test. And the answer was wrong."
Girl: "No it's not wrong. It's in the book!"
I want you to put yourself in Chip's shoes at that instant. He knows that this discussion is going to be fun, and the explanation was going to be spectacularly weird. So he smiled and said "In the book, you say? I'd like to see that."
Well, as you can probably figure out, it was absolutely in the book, but the poor girl had taken the notion of "context" and pounded it into submission with a sledgehammer.
Now, "the book" was the biology textbook, of course. If you can recall high school textbooks (I took high school biology during the LBJ Administration, but I do remember the idea), you'll remember that, in the text, periodically an author would introduce a new and likely unfamiliar word. He would then define it in parentheses thereafter, like "... can be found adjacent to the pituitary gland (the gland that produces hormones that control many bodily functions) ...". Those were the kind of words or terms that would be on this kind of test.
So the girl says to Chip, "It's in the book, right here", and showed him the page. Now before you read further, take a brief second and try to imagine what was on the page. You might not have a clue.
In the book was the following, within a paragraph that wasn't even about plants per se, but about some archaeological work. The author was discussing plant fossils that had been discovered and analyzed. Here is what was in the book:
[after discussing the archaeological finds] ... "Some of these fossilized leaves were so well preserved that the stomata (pores; sing. stoma) for the exchange of gases are still intact."
"See", she said, "right there!"
And indeed it was. Clearly, she had discovered where the word she was trying to define was first cited in the book. What she didn't get, of course, was that words of Greek origin that end in "-ma" make their plurals by adding "-ta" to them, like "dogma" and "stigma." So the notion of "sing." being just the word "singular", abbreviated, was lost on her.
But she knew it was important and, knowing no other way to incorporate it, she just force-fit it into the best sentence she could come up with, realizing that the instance of "stoma" could be skipped. Unfortunately for her at least, no one else in the class had a clue how to define the word, so when the other guy, the poor student, asked her for her answer, she gave it to him.
Fortunately for us and posterity, of course, he did copy the answer, and she did get a zero, and that gave us all some insight into the workings of the student mind. And a very curious story.
"... for the exchange of gases ..."
Copyright 2026 by Robert Sutton. Like what you read here? There are over 1,000 posts from Bob at www.uberthoughtsUSA.com and, after four years of writing a new one daily, he still posts thoughts once in a while as "visiting columns", no longer the "prolific essayist" he was through 2018, but still around. Appearance, advertising, sponsorship and interview inquiries cheerfully welcomed at bsutton@alum.mit.edu or on Twitter at @rmosutton.