Learn Me Gooder, page 20
I don’t think most people realize that teachers often have to be master detectives and interrogators to get to the bottom of things. Not to mention expert hand-writing analysts to figure out who didn’t put their name on a test or who forged their parent’s signature on their report card.
With TAKS behind us, and only about a month left in the school year, we can finally get around to some of the fun stuff on the curriculum. Today we started to read about the solar system from our science textbooks. These are the same textbooks we’ve been using since I started teaching, so they are a bit outdated in terms of the current planetary lineup.
When we came across the sentence that said, “There are nine planets in the solar system, including Earth,” I had to stop for a moment and explain why this was no longer the case.
All of the kids seemed dumbfounded that Pluto was no longer considered a planet. Mickey even blurted out, “Pluto got blowed up?”
No, it was more like being voted off the island. Maybe I should tell the kids that there was one big episode of Solar System Idol, and Pluto’s performance just wasn’t up to snuff. Some experts questioned its choice of “Cold as Ice” by Foreigner, and the gold sequined unitard really had people wondering.
Here’s what the judges had to say:
Randy: “You rock, dawg! Really! You’re a rock, and you’re named after a Disney dawg!”
Simon: “That was really pathetic. You call yourself a planet – but where’s the warmth? I’ve seen more personality and spirit from an errant comet. Next you’ll be claiming planethood for that so-called ‘moon’ of yours.”
Paula: “Our mystic fathers joined together to drink from the river of the galaxy. I feel like the ultimate bingo winner in a high-stakes universe with multiple realities. Meet me in my dressing room.”
Ultimately a big group of scientists banded together to kick Pluto to the curb. I think I read somewhere that Mel Gibson’s father has already begun to promote the word that there have always only been eight planets.
I told the kids that one of the reasons for Pluto’s exile was that it did not meet size requirements. It was just too small to be a planet.
Clarisa asked me, “So Pluto is so small it would fit in this room?”
Um, noooo, not quite THAT small.
“But it would fit inside the school, right?”
To them, small means a cat, and big means an elephant. Anything beyond that, and they have a very hard time comprehending. Telling them Pluto is small is kind of like telling them that a Pinot Noir from 1857 is overrated – they’re just not going to grasp it.
Interestingly enough, Uranus is still large enough to be considered a planet.
Later,
Mel Keyway
Date: Wednesday, May 5, 2010
To: Fred Bommerson
From: Jack Woodson
Subject: Bad Breath of a Salesman
Hey man,
Nope, I don’t think Uranus humor will ever not be funny. I’ve entertained myself greatly over the past couple of days by slipping Uranus jokes into conversation during science class. At last count, I was up to 19.
In fact, Mrs. Davidson, the Behavioral Unit teacher who’s been sitting in class with Felicia, had to excuse herself from the room yesterday because she started giggling loudly. This left us with a potentially dangerous situation, because I don’t think Felicia’s pepper water would stand a chance against the denizens of Uranus.
20!
Yesterday, we went to an assembly in the auditorium so the kids could learn about this year’s fundraising activity. Each child was given a case of “World’s Greatest Chocolate” bars to sell to their friends and family (and weak-willed teachers), and sales will benefit the PTA at the school.
The guy who gave the presentation kept the kids’ attention by doing a lot of magic tricks and promising great prizes to anyone who sold a lot of chocolate. Mention prizes to these kids and they go bananas. They have no intention whatsoever of actually doing whatever it takes to WIN the prizes, but just HEARING about the prizes is like winning the lottery for them.
They’ve been doing the candy bar sales here at my school for several years now. Before that, it was some kind of coupon book they had to sell.
This makes me think back to when I was in the third grade, and my school’s fundraiser was having us sell fertilizer door-to-door. I didn’t think anything of it at the time, but looking back on it, that seems a really odd choice of merchandise to have an eight-year-old child sell. But sell it, I did. I sold more than anyone else in my class. I don’t know if this was because people in my neighborhood really needed fertilizer, or if it was just a welcome relief from all of the other kids selling candy.
“If that’s just another snot-nosed kid selling M&M’s... Wait – what’s this? Fertilizer?!? THANK YOU, GOD!!”
I remember there was one guy in the neighborhood who really boosted my sales. The whole time I was meticulously working my way through my carefully prepared sales pitch, he was making impatient gestures as if to say, “Get on with it,” and when I finally did finish, he immediately stated, “Yeah, okay, gimme twenty bags.”
I can understand buying a two dollar candy bar because you want the kid doing the hard sell to feel successful. Nobody pity-buys a fifty-pound bag of fertilizer.
Thankfully, I wasn’t out there lugging around huge bags of manure – it was a system of pre-order and cash on delivery. And instead of some crappy plastic prizes like my students get here at the school, we were actually paid a commission. For every bag we sold, we received a Susan B. Anthony dollar. When I first laid eyes on this previously unheard of coinage – the reward for my hard efforts – my reaction was, “What the *%$# is that??”
But, ridiculous coinage aside, I had been paid handsomely for my hard work, so I offered to use some of my money to take the family out to dinner. We went to Pizza Hut and pigged out. When my mom and I went up to the counter to pay at the end of the meal, I carefully laid out ten Susies before the waitress got to the register. When she came to ring us up, she asked, “Who put all these quarters here?”
My current third graders don’t need to worry about being paid in some obscure monetary unit. Instead, the kids who sell at least two boxes will get a little party at the end of the school year with an air bounce, ring toss, and other hokey little games.
They’d probably just lose the quarters anyway.
Personally, I think it’s rather foolish to give every kid a case of candy bars right off the bat. Not all of them are going to have the drive to sell them and return with money. Or, in the case of Cerulean, they might not have the will power not to just eat the chocolate themselves.
Cerulean, who walks herself from Ms. Hamm’s special ed class back to my room around 2:45 each afternoon, decided today to duck into the bathroom and eat herself into a chocolate-induced stupor.
Someone found her in the back corner of the restroom, glassy-eyed and near-comatose. Talk about a Functional Voiding Disturbance! She had eaten five candy bars and unwrapped a sixth. No amount of magic tricks can counter that sort of determination.
On a completely different note, Jill called me last night. I almost didn’t answer the phone, but I’m really glad I did. We talked for quite a while, and the key message was that she wants to get back together. She said that she went out with the ex-boyfriend a couple of times and quickly realized that the spark wasn’t there and that she missed me. She wanted to wait until after the stress of TAKS to contact me, but she wanted to see me again as soon as possible.
I might be a total fool for agreeing to try this relationship out again, but I’ve always believed in the saying, “Itsy-es better to have lost in love than never to get lost at all.” Or something like that. At any rate, I think Jill is worth the risk. It’s not like she screwed me over or anything. She just needed to sort things out, and she’s obviously arrived at the right decision.
I’m going to be very optimistic about this working out for real this time. Just like I’m optimistic about someday receiving super powers from an advanced alien civilization. Hey, at least one of them is probable, right?
Talk to you later,
Ray Demption
Date: Monday, May 10, 2010
To: Fred Bommerson
From: Jack Woodson
Subject: Dino-Mite!
Hey dude,
I told you, I have no idea why fertilizer was the sale item of choice during my formative years. And yes, I’m going to continue to call it fertilizer, not the four letter expletive that you kept slinging around.
Cerulean is fine, thanks for asking. Her mom had to cough up the money for the bars she ate, and the rest were returned to the office. I don’t think Cerulean is going to be going anywhere near chocolate of any sort for quite a while.
Thanks for your support on the matter of Jill. Don’t worry, if things work out, as I hope they will, I’ll forgive you for calling her a black spork.
Back to school stuff, this afternoon, I was talking with my class about the solar system, and we started discussing asteroids and meteors. I explained to the kids that there is a theory that says that a huge meteor struck the Earth, and this is what caused all of the dinosaurs to die.
Since I have painstakingly taught them the scientific method, this immediately led to fact-finding questions of, “Where are the dinosaurs now?” “Did King Kong live with the dinosaurs?” and, “Did you see Jurassic Park?”
Once we were on the topic of dinosaurs and their ilk, Lance saw fit to share a story about the time he picked up a lizard and put it in his cousin’s sandwich. While all of the other kids in the class were making retching sounds, I tried to explain that you should never touch a lizard, or any other wild animal for that matter, because of the diseases they carry. Without actually using the word salmonella, I told the kids that lizards carry a disease that can make your stomach hurt really bad.
A couple of the kids piped up with, “And you can get rabies!!” I agreed with them that rabies is a disease that some animals carry.
Victor then raised his hand and asked, “Do birds give you herpes?”
While the sarcastic side of me wanted to answer, “Yes, and those lousy unicorns will give you genital warts,” I instead responded with, “Uhhhhhhhhhh, I don’t think so. But I wouldn’t chance it.”
Since there are only three weeks (and change) of school left, I thought I would stop having a word problem as my bell ringer activity and switch to something more fun. Of course, I suppose I should have remembered that fun is in the brain of the beholder.
I’ve got a set of overhead transparencies that display logic puzzles. You know the ones – Bozo, Flozo, and Schmozo own a dog, a cat, and a herpes-spreading parakeet. Read these clues and fill in the grid to determine which pet goes with which kid.
Personally, I have always LOVED logic puzzles like this. Of course, I love math also, so call me screwy. When I’ve done logic puzzles with my third graders in the past, they’ve enjoyed them as well.
Maybe these kids will grow into them. However, the first day was no reason to celebrate their arrival.
The first puzzle in the set involved three boys – Richie, Howard, and Leo – having their birthday parties at three different places – the swimming pool, the roller rink, and the mini golf course. I showed the kids how they needed to copy the grid that had the boys’ names and the place names. We read the first clue together, which said something along the lines of, “Richie and the boy who had his party at the roller rink are best friends.”
I then asked the kids, “So what does this clue tell us about Richie or the other boys?”
Several hands went into the air. I called on Betsy, who is one of my brighter girls.
“It tells us that they are very excited about having their birthday parties?”
Hmmm… I hadn’t considered that. I replied, “Um, they probably are, but remember we’re trying to figure out WHERE each boy is having his party.”
Next I called on Amir.
“They are happy?”
OK, I thought, this is not going in the right direction. Maybe if, instead of party locations, the top part of the grid showed emotions like Happy, Excited, and Manic-Depressive, THEN we’d be getting somewhere.
But still I pressed on. “The boys are all happy and excited, but we are looking for a clue to WHERE the boys are having their parties. Let’s read the clue again. Richie AND the boy who had his party at the roller rink. What do you think?”
Hillary had her hand raised.
“I think they will have their parties at a house because those places are too expensive.”
By this time, I was making “gaga” sounds, flapping my lips with my finger, and rolling my head around in circles. Finally, Thilleenica stepped up and offered the right piece of information from the clue.
Despite the rough first outing, I am determined to stay the course here. I feel strongly that puzzles like this really exercise the brain, and I have some kids whose brains seem to be morbidly obese.
Maybe tomorrow’s puzzle should be about animals and the disease each one spreads. That might capture the kids’ interest a little better.
Later,
Jude Lawjic
Date: Wednesday, May 12, 2010
To: Fred Bommerson
From: Jack Woodson
Subject: What is that heavenly aroma?
Hey Fred,
I certainly did enjoy your hand-crafted logic puzzle about recent woes there at HPU. Let me see if I interpreted the clues correctly. I’m going to go with Latya getting busted for coming in to work at 11:00 three days in a row; Tiffany leaving a tube of lipstick to melt all over a circuit board; and Larry hitting on the new parts inspector out on the line.
Though those last two really could go either way.
The melted lipstick almost sounds like the beginning of a science project, so it’s fitting that that’s my topic for today. I am super thankful that this year, we moved the science fair to a date AFTER the TAKS. There have been years when we’ve had to squeeze in projects while stressing over math review. During those years, I will admit, I was much more lenient and allowed somewhat less than rigorous project ideas.
“OK, class, we have 30 minutes to complete the project, and that’s it! If you don’t already have an idea, we’re going with, ‘How many fingers does Mr. Woodson have?’ Write down your hypothesis now.”
You’d be amazed at how wild and varied the guesses were.
A few weeks ago, we spent a few days doing a sample project together. It was titled, “Which will fly farther: a plain paper airplane or a paper airplane with a paperclip on the nose?”
It was a nice diversion during TAKS review week, the kids had fun, and I got to show them exactly what would be expected on their projects.
At one point, one of my cabinet doors was left open, and Jacob saw the big bottle of ketchup I keep on a shelf (ever since the run-in with the Ketchup Nazi). He pointed to it and asked, “Are we doing a science experiment with that?”
We certainly weren’t going to waste perfectly good Heinz on an experiment, but it was good to see that at least some of the kids had their brains in science project mode.
For the weekend right after the TAKS, their homework was to jot down a few ideas for potential projects to explore. I was looking for some open-ended questions and some feeling for what kinds of experiments they were interested in.
I got back a few viable responses, but as usual, the nonviable ones blew them out of the water.
I figured there would be some questions that don’t require an experiment to answer. Lakeisha submitted, “What is longer, a ruler or a journal?”
Hey, at least she’s exploring, right?
Tyler gave me one that would actually be interesting to see put into motion: “How does a solid change when you hit something with it?”
I can imagine Tyler walking around whacking everything in sight with a backpack, a lunch box, or a baseball bat.
Kevin asked, “How long can a human stay underwater?”
Not a bad question, though I’m not sure how we’d test it here in the classroom. I’m tempted to tell him to revise it to “How long can a third grader stay quiet?”
From the “Let Me Know When You Find the Answer” files, Chassany asked, “How do you think liquid was invented?”
Or maybe it was “How do you think liquor was invented?” – the spelling was a bit hard to make out.
Betsy turned in one of my favorites: “If I stop feeding my turtle for 10 days will it die?”
My hypothesis – the turtle will croak.
Not at all unexpectedly, Eddie took the prize for the most bizarre response:
“Which one will last longer – game or cake?”
We might need a separate science project just to INTERPRET that question!
I (gently) suggested a few other ideas to some of these kids, but for the most part, I’ve let the kids choose their partners and choose their projects, and today we started doing the experiments in class.
Miles, Tomas, and Jessie are probably going to win first prize. They have three different types of liquid – water, Hawaiian Punch, and Coca-Cola – and they are attempting to determine which liquid will best clean a penny. I’ve hardly had to help them at all. They have a very sound procedure, and they’ve kept to it.
Three other boys – Jacob, Nestor, and Franco– needed some class participation to complete their project – “Can you identify an object by its smell?” These three were on the ball and had already brought in their materials early last week. That fact will come into play later in my story.
The boys chose five classmates to serve as test subjects, and one at a time they blindfolded their volunteer then held objects in front of that person’s nose, asking them to identify the object by its smell.
Their materials list included:
