Sirens of Science

i've started noticing something in my classes. girls are dotting their i's with hearts, writing about how much they love tony, and have in a oh-so-subtle way stopped being as verbal as usual. not that they aren't chatty in general, they just don't raise their hands as much to talk or answer questions. being cute and talking to boys is starting to become rather important, and being the smart girl isn't necessarily so awesome anymore. it's really weird and hard to observe as a woman who WAS that girl that didn't care about being smarter than the boys. yes, glad i didn't quiet down, but i also know that it can make you the least favorite/most grossest girl during a time when being accepted is everything. SO, i am going to try to work my smart ladies through all this. or at least give them a place to express their concerns and frustrations and drink tea. i have started the "sirens of science" club that is going to meet every wednesday after school. it's girls-only and we talk about girl-type stuff. it was a pretty interesting thing to dismiss the boys from class and then tell only the girls in each class that i get what happens in 8th grade and it's a totally weird time where being a smart girl can make you be not so cute or desirable. i assured them at "sirens" we're not going to sit around talking about periods or vaginas, unless they want to. and yes... when one group of boys asked what was going on and why they weren't invited to the party i told them we were all talking about vaginas. and i think every single one of those boys got an erection. and they were incredibly quiet for the first 15 minutes of class and stared even harder at my boobs. so hard.

i also made kids apologize today when they laughed at a student for giving the wrong answer to a question. made me so mad. they laughed, i scolded, then the class continued, then i stopped because i was still mad and felt terrible and made them say they were sorry to the kid they laughed at. they laughed at soren. he spelled nickel wrong. big fucking deal. i then made the kid who laughed at him spell every single chemical name on the quiz. out loud. phosphorus, calcium, titanium, fluorine. sucker.

bettie... oh bettie

bettie. bettie. bettie.

emo gases

i didn't think i'd ever be explaining shoegazing to my students, but there i was doing it today. i was introducing students to the different groups in the periodic table (alkalis, alkaline earth metals, halogens, noble gases) and was explaining how stable noble gases are because they have full valence shells. so full, in fact, that they have no motivation to hang out with any other elements because they are quite content with the electrons they have. i then heard one of my students say "oh, so they're like emo then." holy. cow. yes... yes noble gases are totally emo. i think my response was something like "well, it's not like they listen to death cab for cutie or anything, but yes, you could think of them as emo. or shoegazers." my students had no idea what that meant, so of course i demonstrated and they laughed like maniacs. cus shoegazing is ridiculous. and then ol' jermone asked whether opening fire at an emo concert would be the best thing for a serial killer to do. because all the emo kids would be staring at their shoes and not paying attention to what's going on. how do you answer that? i told him to not start getting ideas and finish coloring in his alkali metals.

shoegazing electron hogs.

hardcore electrons

today we talked about valence electrons. i explained that valence electrons are those electrons that are found in the outermost energy level of an atom. any electrons that are not valence electrons are called "core" electrons. i then said, "but, if you're an electron that listens to municipal waste, you're what we call a hardcore electron." i then started laughing super hard and looked at my class. they weren't laughing. at all. someone said "is that a band?," and someone else yelled "of course it's a band." yes. yes it's a band. and they're going to fuck you up.

slut bag electrons

today i called valence electrons "slutty." actually, i think i used the term "slut bags" and then remarked that i should be fired. every day.

and it appears as though the parents from hell have again risen from their pampered graves. there's one really special one that appears to have an excessive amount of free time on her hands and likes to send me four page emails. four page emails about how the science fair projects last year were 90% "dribble" (reminder: these kids are 12 and under), how demoralizing i am, how i have caused irreparable damage to her daughter and other children, how my standards are not high enough and she has established her own set of guidelines for her daughter to follow for the science fair (and is going to cause her daughter to bomb this project cus she has no idea what she is doing), and how she needs to stop her email message because she needs to dry the tears from her daughter's face, a daughter who apparently has never shed a fucking tear until she met me. me, the evil, evil science teacher who likes to take children's dreams and crush them under her stylish boots. crush them and then turn them into fertilizer for the garden where i plant and nourish the hopes and wishes of even more children, only then later to tear them out by whatever roots they may have established and feed them to packs of dogs that i have ripped the teeth out of. they mash these prematurely destroyed dreams between their gumless jaws and turn them into a paste of pain. a paste of pain that i lather on my veggie burgers and eat after long days of sucking the souls out of pre-teens. and did i mention that these dogs had dreams of their own? dreams of being winners at westminster. yeah? well, fuck you dogs. shi-tzus, pomeranians, i don't give a fuck. i'm a dream destroyer.

666

today i told a class "your jesus is my devil." what i had intended on saying was "one man's devil is another man's jesus"... but it didn't come out that way. and how did we get there? the atomic number of carbon is 6. it has 6 protons. it can also have 6 neutrons. 666. take it from there..

switzerland is for suckers

today i gave my students their first atomic structure lesson. i was going through the parts of the atom and the charges associated with each. so protons are "pro" meaning positive... and then electrons are negative and are in the electron cloud.. and then there's neutrons, which are neutral like switzerland, meaning they don't have any charge. i say this in one of my classes and hear zach (the smoke machine kid/one who got thrown to the ground earlier in the year) mumble "yeah right, like switzerland is neutral." SO AWESOME. twelve and apparently has beef with the swiss.

there's a reason substitutes have a reputation

thursday i was out sick with the flu. i felt bad about not going in because the students have an exam on monday and i wanted to make sure that everything had been covered. all sympathy for these children masquerading in pre-teen bodies disappeared when i returned to my classroom on friday and discovered that a class of mine broke one of my funky science gadgets. there was some note on it from the substitute (who is a story in himself) saying "sorry, 848 broke your newton's cradle. can fix with fishing line." problem #1: this cradle was on my desk = personal items = booger-coated children's hands should not be touching it. problem #2: there's no way the students should have even been out of their desks. i also hear reports from other teachers who have classes near mine that the kids were absolutely out of control and super loud and rather obnoxious. so, i'm mad at the kids for being doofuses, and also at the substitute because he let things get out of hand.

and let's give a little background on this substitute. i was trying to give him the benefit of the doubt because he's an adult and i heard the kids kind of making fun of him, but after my own interaction with him, yah... he's creepy and gross. a couple of weeks ago i was in the teacher's lounge making copies and he comes in. we say hello, and then i continue on with my stapling, hoping and wishing that i don't have to engage in idle chit-chat with this guy. he's sitting at the computer, and even though i have my chin buried into my chest and am stapling away, i can feel him staring at me. he finally says "so, what'd you get your phd in?" i tell him, he keeps staring, then says "wow, we're sure lucky to have you." um.. ok. stop looking at me and get your beady, undressing eyes back on the screen. i think i said "sometimes" and got up to check my copies... willing the copy machine to jam so i can really focus on something else. so Creepo McSub is sitting at the computer when he all of a sudden exclaims "oh man, they finally found the guy who killed my friend." shit. shit. shit. how do you not ask what that's about? so i make the mistake of asking what that's about, and what follows is pure insanity. his ex-fiance's cousin was a prostitute and she was killed by some guy who apparently was a serial killer and all this went down at a really hard time in his life and he and his ex-fiance were really trying to make things work and he's telling the prostitute to really watch herself and then she gets killed and it makes things all the worse for him because he's really trying to "stay straight and not do things he's not supposed to." which to me sounds like touching children inappropriately and/or shoving household items into his crevices. so no.. i do not like this sub.

back to room destruction: i'm in my room that morning, and Creepo comes in, staring at me, asking me how i'm doing, then saying how sorry he is about my newton's cradle, and he could fix it for me, and i say no, and then he asks if i'm going to fix it, i say yes, and then he starts talking about the vintage record player in the corner of my room and how he was going to take it home to see if it works and HELLS NO. you are not taking my vintage record player. BUG OFF BUDDY. YOU ARE INCREDIBLY GROSS AND I WANT TO CUT OFF YOUR WAIST-LONG PONYTAIL AND MAKE YOU EAT IT.

the wrath the children received that day: the quiet, quiet mad. the mad that's worse than the screaming mad. "i was hoping you all were responsible enough to allow you to do some really cool science stuff, but right now i don't know if that's possible." "i felt so bad not coming into school yesterday with the test coming up but all that sympathy is gone." lame but apparently effective: my classes uttered zero peeps of anything and a girl cried when i told her how disrespectful she was acting to both me and other teachers and 1/2 of the disaster team came after school to tell me she broke my toy. AND, i found out two 8th grade boys "like" me. like "like like" me. oh dang. must be the solid black i wear and my unstyled hair.

we'll just make him feel bad

yesterday i gave out detentions to kids who are not handing in their work and have not been habitually. we have to give 24 hour notice, so of course i get notes back from parents saying that they do not agree with the detention and there is no way their kid is not handing in their work. good job showing your kids to take responsibility. i also had a few kids not show up for detention all together. for those kids: today's class = writing word-for-word out of the textbook for 70 minutes. what i found out later: that qualifies as corporal punishment. that and making a student write something over and over. like if i made them write "one of the reasons our educational system is in the toilet is because there is no fear of punishment or being made to do something you really don't want to do." this, of course, is juxtaposed with teachers who whisper ever so gently in their students' ears that they will "break their neck if they open their mouth to say something like that again" just quietly enough for no one else to hear, and can calmly deny ever saying it if it comes up later. and yes, a teacher told me that yesterday. and yes, he is one of my favorite people and wears fantastic shoes and is the most feminine male we have on staff.

yesterday i also walked out of my room to see two huge, gross baltimore police officers patrolling the halls. i caught stride with a kid, we both looked back kind of befuddled, and i said "what are they doing here? don't they have anything better to do?" and oh did he giggle. the security guard that likes my boobs later came into my room and i asked him what was up with the po-po. turns out some kid called north avenue (school headquarters) saying there was some riot at the school and we were in lockdown. not true. i asked "why would you do that?" and the security guard's response "because half of baltimore is made up of assholes. you didn't know that?" turns out there were helicopters flying above the school, although you never would have known that had you asked a teacher if anything was going down at the school. we just see police officers strolling through the halls like storm troopers with bad haircuts.

the awesome moment of the day: we're listening to the afternoon announcements and some kid's letter to obama is being read and it makes no sense and is super boring and at a point says something about a "victorious win." that's when one of my students asks "but how could you have a win that isn't victorious? that doesn't make any sense." well done, sir. i laughed quite hard and then told him that the bush victory in 2004 is the only example of an "unvictorious win" that i could think of.

dog jerky

so i decided to dog-sit Izzy this weekend. Izzy is Professor Proton's non-sexual domestic life partner. they like each other very much and the pictures are what happens when these two creatures get together. lots of romping and tromping and then total exhaustion.

we had a nice day yesterday: took a trip to the dog park, watched "A Bucket of Blood," finished Valley of the Dolls. good day. we all settle in for the evening and i decide it's best to put all of us in the same room (my bedroom) to prevent any whining/crying. BIGGEST FUCKING MISTAKE OF MY LIFE. i was trying to get started on a great new book my sister sent me, but had a bit of a difficult time getting into it due to the beasts frolicking and romping on top of page 2. Proton is also getting super protective/territorial and basically screaming any time Izzy gets close to the bed. so, i decide that turning the lights off and trying to go to sleep would be the best for everyone. that's at 9:30 p.m. for the next three hours i listened to Izzy run back and forth to the window, barking at anybody/anything that might move outside of it. it was like having country dog visiting the city or something. "WOH, WHAT'S THAT. HOLY COW.. IT'S A STREETLIGHT. AND WAIT-- WHAT'S THAT? A PARKING METER? JESUS CHRIST!! HAVE YOU GUYS SEEN THIS?" and then the barking would begin. and izzy is huge. so her moving around sounds like an intruder in my room. so, of course, i need to check every time i hear to moving to make sure it's really still the dog. when she wasn't walking around, she was trying to get Proton to fight with her. at 1:30 a.m. i took her outside to see if all the moving around was due to her having to go to the bathroom or something. nope. not at all. we get back inside and it continues. at this point i mumble out loud "please, all i want to do is sleep." but Izzy's got other things on her mind. i manage to hit dreamland briefly, but am awakened by this heavy weight on my chest. that would be Izzy laying on top of me. i don't know how much Izzy weighs, but it's about 15.5 protons and once Proton realizes what's going on there's a fucking dog battle on top of me. so much dog screaming. at that point i about lost my mind and upped the ante on my verbalization to "i wish i was dead." i guess that sort of was answered cus right now i feel about half-dead. another trip outside at 6:30 a.m. and finally throwing in the towel for reals at 9:00 a.m.

and now they're exhausted. assholes.

explicit... so explicit

this note was hanging in the entryway of my building this morning.

today i had professional development. i'm not sure what i'm exactly supposed to be developing into, but if it's a disgruntled and irritated teacher, job well done. we had to go to a session on "explicit lesson planning." the presentation went something like this:

"so explicit learning and explicit lesson planning is all about being explicit. you need to be very explicit about what the lesson plan is going to be about, and make sure you say it explicitly. ok here, on this next slide you can see what the definition of explicit learning is-- it's about being explicit in your lesson planning. ok... so we're going to do an activity about what explicit learning is. identify those times when the educator is being explicit. then, we'll regroup and talk about the definition of explicit learning."

BULLET IN MY FACE.

and it lasted 90 minutes. bottom line: explicit learning = turning children into robots. pretty gross stuff. i don't know how i can say that any more explicitly, but i think i explicitly think it's a bunch of *explicative.*

just in case you forgot....

how crazy it all was...

today when i was leaving work and walking to my car i noticed a miata parked in the staff lot with a hella bumper stickers on it. 5-6 bumper stickers with all sorts of gross stuff, including the standard "mccain," but there also was a "I LOVE SARAH!" with "PALIN" written underneath it in some gross-ass conservative penmanship. i said "what the fuck?" out loud and then immediately made it my mission to figure out who this creep is because they are 1- teaching, and 2- probably breeding. honestly. you really think they're great enough to have that bullshit all over your miata. you drive a miata. i want to punch you.

caloric mediation

well, i got to break up my first fight this week. maybe not a FULL fight, but the kid that ran the smoke machine got pushed across the room and to the floor by an idiot moron because smoke kid didn't tell him the answer to a problem. idiot. and holy shit did i yell. i don't know if that voice has ever come out of my body before, but i definitely lowered it a few notches and made it BOOMING loud and children scurried out of my room like roaches when the verbal storm started.

when my students weren't being huge freaking babies and throwing each other across the room, they were busy learning about the calorie. such a simple idea. the calorie. who knew that my lessons on the calorie and caloric intake would lead to calorie-eating contests. because apparently in middle school everything can be reduced to a competition. last night nathan g, estimated weight 89 pounds, ate a Big Mac meal and 1/2 an apple pie. total estimated calories taken in over a 24 hour period: 3600. this surpassed the caloric intake of raven, estimated weight 115 pounds and twice as tall as Nathan, even though she ate an entire pint of Ben & Jerry's last night. this evening ned and soren are challenging each other. great. i've voiced my displeasure at this contest because of the probability of one of them pooping in their pants and all over my classroom.

we also had a lab today where my students had to climb a flight of stairs and time themselves to determine work and power. i was discussing the results with a group of students and they mentioned something about the stairs moving. i said "wait... the stairs moved?" they said yes. i then asked them if they were on acid, because that's the only time the stairs should be moving. they looked at me with huge doe-like eyes and didn't say anything. i repeated the question. one student said "not now, but maybe later." i then realized that they had ZERO idea what acid was and i was digging myself into a freaking grave. and yes... i said half of that last sentence out loud to them.

soren maintains supremecy

once again, soren has proven his position as supreme student. because of his inquiry into whether or not i thought the electoral college was a good idea, i gave him a printed copy of federalist paper 68. i don't know if he'll read it, but he just might. but the real showmanship: we're on the energy unit and i was showing kids how energy is transformed from one form to another and picked up a flashlight. i said that the batteries were potential energy and energy is changed to light when the flashlight is turned on. when i turned it on, the kids looked legitimately shocked that light came out of the end of it. i then said "wow. you guys look really surprised by that light. what are you? puritans in 1858?" and holy smokes did soren laugh. put his head down on the desk and laughed and laughed. SCORE!

and if you haven't caught a bit of children's programming on saturday, do yourself a favor. i just saw a commercial for "wet babies." apparently they squirt water on you when you squeeze them. one six-year-old's comment when said wet baby did just that "you're my baby now." really? if that's the criteria then color me mama. and doesn't seem like squeezing infants is a good idea to reinforce in six-year-olds. i think we all know they take things literally and the last thing we need is a renegade group of children with claw-like squeezing capabilities causing a wave of pissing and puking babies. regurgitating children they then insist are theirs.

puking pumpkins

highlights of the halloween weekend: the professor in a bowtie, ladies dressed as boys peeing in urinals, the simpsons halloween episode, and children dressed as pumpkins. pumpkins with zero self-control. at a halloween party this weekend, my friends and i were enjoying some delicious treats when i noticed an adorable little kid dressed as a pumpkin. the child was being held by his mother, who was enjoying a healthy amount of crab dip. as i'm shoving salsa in my mouth, i notice that the face of the little gourd is kind of scrinching up, and then white puke liquid starts dribbling down the kid's chin and onto his costume. i make a puking sound of my own and start laughing incredibly hard as the baby puke continues, saturating the front of his costume and getting dangerously close to both his mother's arm and her costume. she, of course, doesn't notice any of this happening until about 10 seconds after the vomit eruption occurred. What used to be a cute kid in a pumpkin costume was transformed into a bile-caked, vomit-soaked gross-ass bastard of a baby. good job breeders.

But why would a zombie want to eat a human?

last night the Professor insisted on dressing up for the crew of friends that came over to optimize costumes, enjoy Thai, and discuss the temperaments of dog breeds (weimaraners are apparently the dicks of the dog world). needless to say, the excitement of the evening was a bit too much for him and he passed out con bowtie.

the lesson to finish off the week was a delightful one. we are currently studying kinetic energy and potential energy, so i wanted to figure out a way to incorporate those concepts and halloween terror. this resulted in : 1- finishing off the daily math race by blasting the kids in the face with strobe lights; and 2- watching Night of the Living Dead and determining the kinetic energy of Barbra's car as it is coasting downhill in the graveyard, the potential energy of the half-eaten head at the top of the stairs, and the kinetic energy of zombies of varying masses. we discussed how Barbra might increase her kinetic energy in the car, either by increasing her velocity OR increasing the mass of the car. one of my students remarked that if the zombie jumped on top of her car the mass of the car would be increased. "yes", i replied, "but then you find yourself in the situation where you have a zombie on top of your car. although, it's better than having a zombie inside your car because they have terrible taste in music and always want to control the radio." i then spent the next few minutes reassuring students that i have never had a real zombie in my car.

and man did my students hate Barbra. every class erupted in cheers when Ben punched Barbra in the face, a scene i had kind of forgot about. there were also comments about how "there's always a shotgun in the closet." um.... ok. i even had a couple kids stay after school to finish watching the movie. so great... i'm just hoping that wasn't because their parents don't let them watch scary stuff and now i'm enabling them. but i'm ok with that. we also got into a rousing debate on why zombies aren't technically dead, but they're also not alive either. soren didn't buy it. the discussion went something like this:

soren: so zombies are alive.
me: no... they're not exactly alive, but they're not dead either. they're the undead.
soren: but they're moving around like they're alive like humans. they're using energy.
nathan (other student watching the film): but humans are alive and they aren't zombies.
soren: yah, but pigs aren't zombies either and they're alive. (he then started laughing super hard)

soren also could not get over why zombies would want to eat humans and not each other. i gently reminded him that if anything, zombies are persistent, but not necessarily intelligent. he just shook his head, genuinely frustrated by the whole zombie population. hopefully the conundrums inherent in zombie livelihood won't keep him tossing and turning all weekend.

quote of the day

"this class is all about balls."

i said it. i knew before i said it i probably shouldn't be saying it. i sort of tried to stop myself as the words were escaping my lips, but the comedic value was too overpowering. to a room of 12-year-olds i said "this class is all about balls." sure, i may be doing demonstrations on kinetic and potential energy using tennis balls and duckpin bowling balls, but my goodness. i tried to balance my vulgarity by showing them how to determine the square root of a number by hand, but i highly doubt an algorithm erased the memory of their science teacher saying "balls."

phallic pony

i highly doubt i am going to be able to do this pony credit, but here goes...

i am helping out with lights for my school's performance of "the legend of sleepy hollow." the headless horseman is being played by two students in an amazing costume: one student acts as the front end of the horseman, with his eyes located where the horseman's chest is and a chopped-off head on the top, and a horse head coming out of where a horse head should be coming out of. or maybe where the horse head should not be coming out of. more on that later. the other student is the horse's butt. the poor kid has to bend over and grab hold of the front kid's hips and gallop around with him to make a complete horseman. it is absolutely one of the cutest/least frightening things i have ever seen.

added hilarity to the costume: the front end kid was walking around the gym tonight before practice sans butt. which means this kid was walking around talking about how crappy the lunch french fries were with a huge phallic horse's head. of course, he kept standing in front of the light table in silhouette, huge horse head protruding from his nether regions. and yes, i was laughing as hard as the 8th grade boys i was sitting with.

to top it off: we're working on the final scene with the horseman, complete with gratuitous smoke machine and strobe lights, and the butt kid is hooking up to the horseface dick kid. as we're all standing around laughing super hard, strobe lights blinding our faces, simon (awesome, awesome simon) says "that's the least scary horse i've ever seen. in fact, it's more like a pony. " jesus christ. i say "yes... a shetland pony." and then we laughed and laughed. and remember, simon is ichabob crane, so he's saying this wearing a huge red scarf tied into a bow, a tri-cornered hat, and breeches. and let's just say the play ends with this headless horseman chasing simon in a hailstorm of strobe lights. i hope for video.

soren strikes again

today was a hell of a day: sex talks, balloon races demonstrating Newton's Third Law, comparisons to No Child Left Behind..... This morning the girls attended a presentation given by a local girls' high school. at one point the woman representing the high school said something not too nice about community colleges, at which point i became super angry and waited until the perfect moment to spring a socially uncomfortable question on her. during the question-and-answer session, i asked her what type of health class they offer the girls. she responded with "oh, you know, the basic semester-long health course on hygiene, body image, diet, those sort of things." i then asked, or maybe yelled, "does that include sex ed?" she uncomfortably muttered "um, yes" then continued her rambling. i knew that the state of sex education in grade/middle schools is shockingly terrible, if there at all, but really had no tangible examples of it until we got back up into my classroom and students are asking me if sex hurts the first time, why they aren't taught about sex, and i at a point need to explain why calling someone a "dyke" is not appropriate (unless, i told them, you're a lesbian yourself). wow. wow. wow. shocking and sad and terrible. and i have officially offered my question-answering abilities to the students, which may or may not be kosher, but i could give a shit. it's messed up how little these kids know about bumping uglies.

as the day continued and i kept up with my mission to try to make kids feel ok with the fact that are getting a B, one student remarked that my reassuring kids that showing improvement and not the actual score on their freaking math drills are what i'm happy to see sounded like "No Child Left Behind." shit. on. bush. dyke.

and then there was the balloon race. this was a lab that involved the kids putting together a balloon + straw + tape contraption that could move up a string using the air released from a blown up balloon. i gave them all the materials then told them to put it together. before we even start, soren asks if i had seen the crab picture. um.. no. he then takes out his math book and opens it up to show me a picture of two people dressed as crabs in the middle of their chapter 2 math review. he's laughing insanely hard and says "they're people dressed as crabs." oh did i giggle. once the balloon building commenced, soren asked if he could be the announcer for the race, which of course i said yes to, and resulted in him standing on a chair and commenting on the building skills of each group and what they looked like and he used a pen as a microphone. i still cannot believe the volume of sound that came out of my classes as they raced the balloons to the front of the room. screaming and jumping and thrashing over balloons and string. i also had students ask me if they could have a piece of string to take home. sure. go nuts. and then... at the end of class soren asks me what i would think if he was getting an A-. which of course i knew he was because i told them their grades today and about broke my heart. i told him i thought it would be freaking fantastic and great and wonderful. and then he smiled. yay.

centripe-what?

just when i think i've lost my students to the somewhat more mundane factoids of science, they come blazing back with remarkable gusto. today's class was on centripetal force, that fantastic force that keeps objects moving in a circle although they'd rather be moving in a straight line, that keeps sweet earth orbiting the sun, the moon the earth, and allows me to do wacky demonstrations in class. the first thing i did was tie a roll of tape to a string and swing it around in a circle in the front of the class, ala lifeguard twirling a whistle. i asked what would happen if the force, or string, all of a sudden was gone and the tape could move as it wanted, i.e. in a straight line? as the students were about to answer, i would let go of the tape and it would go flying into the ceiling, into equipment at the side of the blackboard, into the cabinets, wherever. i knew i was doing my job when the kids all flinched as i made a move to pick up another object. that flinch = they're assuming i'm about to throw something or squirt them in the face. awesome.

the other demonstration i did involved filling a bucket with water and then swinging it around in a circle. amazingly, the water does not fall out of the bucket and instead stays trapped inside... and who knew that this little demonstration was going to blow the roof off the building. i start swinging the bucket and the kids are on the desks, losing their minds, screaming "don't do it!", and then boom... i do it and the room erupts. kids are shaking their heads exclaiming "lord have mercy," others are pumping their fists into the air, others are slack jawed and just staring into space.

water in a bucket.

sedating victims

lesson this week: describing motion

class #1: we're talking about references points and how you need to have something stationary to compare to another object to establish that it's moving. if a reference point is moving, it makes things much more difficult to determine motion, like when two moving cars are next to each other. and then this comes out of my mouth; "it's like when you kidnap someone and want them to not know where they're going or if you're moving. you blindfold them so then can't tell what's going on." then, of course, a student comments that the person might still feel the vibrations, and just in case i really still wanted a job, i say "then that's why you also sedate them."

class #2: i am showing the class a graph showing velocity vs. time and describing acceleration. the particular graph shows increasing acceleration and i say "like if you were driving in a car and see your ex-boyfriend crossing the street, or you're running from the po-po." the students lost their minds that i said "po-po," then i hear soren (the whitest of the white kids who writes on his forehead and is going out with a snobby girl who thinks she's awesome and they sit next to each and next quarter i'm making the seating chart so they sit on opposite sides of the room because he's SO much better than her) say "what's the po-po?", i say "it's the police," tarezz says "who asked who the po-po was?" and i say "hey.. not every white person knows what the po-po is."

apparently i still think i'm teaching in korea where students don't understand half of what i'm saying.

how much smoke is too much smoke?

so i volunteered to help out with the drama club this fall. they're putting on "the legend of sleepy hollow" and i am in charge of teaching the kids how to use the light board and other such fun things. including the smoke machine. i got it working yesterday and set it up for rehearsal today. nothing better than blasting the shit out of that machine behind the curtains and then having oodles of students walk back and start coughing and rubbing their eyes and ask "what's going on?" then, of course, they got super excited once they realized what indeed what was going on: miss dr. larson's going to smoke-blast the balls out of your faces. i showed a techie zack how to use the machine, then uttered "it's not enough smoke machine if they're still breathing" in reference to the poor wheezing juvenile actors. i walked away after giving zach the remote for the machine, then heard the sweet whirring of that machine as he blew an insane amount of smoke onto the stage. kids again started coughing and said it was enough smoke, to which i heard zach reply "if they're still breathing it's not enough smoke machine."

absolutely.

another highlight of the day: oh mr. soren managed to make me laugh so hard today i had to take a break, look down, and breathe as slowly as possible while thinking about the least funny thing i could think of. i was giving a lecture on newton's third law and gravity and as i turned from the blackboard i spotted soren, cross-eyed and staring down the bridge of his nose, trying to see if he could see his nostrils moving as he flared them in and out like a raging bull. he's in the front row. directly in front of my desk. and flaring his nostrils like a crosseyed rabid beast.

inertia and wet tweens

so many funny things happened today:

1- we're discussing inertia and how if something it moving it is not ever going to move unless a force acts on it. and i say that that is a part of how a magician is able to pull a tablecloth from underneath a bunch of dishes.... those dishes are staying put. sweet zachary scrinches up his face, raises his hand, and asks "dr. larson, does that mean that magicians are scientists?" i laughed incredibly hard incredibly loud and then apologized and said "no."

2- i was walking around the classroom checking work for the lab we were doing. i walked up to justin, and he put his head down and started muttering "oh no... oh no... oh no," which struck me as odd since he was not doing anything wrong. as i started talking to him, i realized why he was muttering that. his phone gives him a warning vibrate before it starts ringing, and as i walked towards him his phone started vibrating. it then full-on started ringing, i put out my hand, he handed me his phone, and i answered it. i said hello to the woman calling, who then apologized when she realized she had the wrong number. poor justin lost his phone for the day cus of that lady's wrong number.

3- i have been doing math races (100 problems in 1 minute) to start class and the kids are freaking out loving it. i try to distract them the entire time by whispering their names, tapping their desks, counting down the seconds, whatever. i now have decided to stop kids that go over the time limit by squirting them in the face with water. like cats. today i gave one of my classes a general shower, but when the drill ended in my last class, i squirted soren straight in the face for about 5 seconds. he and his math drill were soaked. thankfully, he started giggling super hard and dried off relatively quickly. this also was the class that told me they had written a rap song about significant figures. i then told them about nerdcore rap and they lost their minds. to top off the class, nathan made a comment about soren being from michigan, i told nathan to watch his mouth because i was from wisconsin, to which the class all went "oooooohhhhh" and sweet erica said "oh nathan, you just got zing-figged." zing-figged. holy shit did i laugh.

4- simon, awesome simon, has started calling me miss dr larson. i laughed the first time he said it, and i think he called me that about 20 times today.

5- i also have told my classes that if i catch them with gum they are no longer spitting it into my hand. they are putting it on their nose for the rest of class.

Here it goes

So after suggestions from friends and relatives and all sorts of folks I have decided to post my daily, and not-so-daily, rantings and observations on an official blog. Wow. As a former technophobe, this is kind of freaking me out. But, the stories demand an outlet, so as a start, I will post some of my favorites from my recent experiences in teaching, and I may even delve into the vault and see what dandies I can dig up.

Yours in cyber-love,
P.Dwarf