Teaching: news, resources, and tips for teachers of all levels of education

For one of the exercises on a (final!) exam that I gave my students, they had to complete the sentences with a personality trait. To make the exercise 'fun', I used the names of the students in my class.

For example: 'Lisa is very ........ She always helps others and she is a good friend.' The students had to fill in 'kind' or 'warm' or something like that.

One of the sentences was: 'Tom is always ............ He never cheats on exams.' One of my students (NOT Tom) wrote down 'honest', and next to the sentence he wrote down: 'I wouldn't agree with this.' (He meant it as a joke, because Tom is known to almost never be honest.)

The next sentence was a sentence with his own name: 'Bart is never ......................, he always pays attention in class.' The students had to fill in 'bored', but Bart wrote down something completely different AND there was a spelling mistake in his answer.

So as a reply (while correcting the exams), I wrote down, next to his sentence: 'I wouldn't agree with this either, haha :)'

Since I just started as a teacher, I don't know if it's appropriate to do things like this. Do you think these things are OK? Of course, I won't do these kind of things on every exam. I wrote 'haha' and a smiley face next to it, to make sure everyone knows it's a joke. I work at a school where people are not very strict, and we laugh a lot. But still, I'm a bit 'scared', because this is my first job as a teacher and this is my 'dream school'. I've always wanted to work here, because my colleagues are so kind and friendly. We are like a group of best friends together.

Just to clarify: I used fictional names in this post!