Ivan makes a joke

In the transcript that i analysed for my phD there are numerous sequences of talk that still "tug" at my thoughts. One of these is the following:

Dina: how do you write peanut butter?
Teacher: where are you going to find peanut butter?,
Ivan: the supermarket ( )

In my analysis of the social organization of independent writing I found many examples like this, where a student asked the teacher how to write a word. The teacher's response was often a question, much like the one she gives above, where the use of 'find' makes salient that the word is written somewhere in the room. Because students usually didn't reply to what appeared to be a question, I took it that the teacher's utterance worked to direct students away from her and to their own independent activity (to find the word somewhere).

In this case however, what caught (and still catches my eye) is the response by Ivan. I noted a number of things in my initial consideration of this sequence:

Ivan's answer used everyday knowledge and was correct in that sense.
Ivan provided an answer to the teacher's question which Dina did not provide.
Ivan answered a question which had not been directed at him, further, he appeared to take the teacher's question as one which needed a response (a question requires an answer, right?)
The teacher didn't comment on his response.

In another part of the transcript i found the following:
Teacher: [where else can you find peanut butter though ((walking away))*
Dominic: the (0.4) peanut (0.2) butter (0.2) sandwich
((Mckiela writing bottom of ‘i’/ Cathlyn glances at Jamie’s book))
Ivan: in the supermar- !ket (0.4) ((laughs))

Here, I was taken by Ivan's laughter, and it was this segment of data that enabled me to consider the ways in which Ivan's interaction with the teacher made her talk about finding words seem very strange. I considered some of the following:

why would he answer a question that was not directed at him when the classroom rules about talk with the teacher usually do not permit this?
why did he give the same answer again that he had used previously, in another interaction that involved the teacher?
why did he articulate the word supermarket with such emphasis, and why did he then laugh?

My consideration overall of some of these questions went beyond comment in this blog post, however, i did decide that Ivan's interaction showed his understanding of the taken-for-granted use in the classroom of talk about finding words. Further, it suggested to me that this use of "finding" words was a specialized aspect of talk in his classroom. Ivan 's attempt to make a joke was premised on the shared understanding of talk about finding words and their real world instantiations. So, the teacher's question about finding "peanut butter" needed to be understood contextually as referring to the print in the room rather than to the real world context in which "peanut butter" could be found. Ivan used this shared understanding to make a joke.

From my research perspective, Ivan's utterance also made strange the classroom talk about finding words.