"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."
Thursday, October 30, 2008
Monday, October 27, 2008
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.
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.
Friday, October 24, 2008
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.
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.
Wednesday, October 22, 2008
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.
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.
Tuesday, October 21, 2008
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.
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.
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.
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
Yours in cyber-love,
P.Dwarf
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