kinetic eagle scouts

i have started a kinetic sculpture race club at my school. i love the kinetic sculpture race. so much. such a great time and people wear crazy hats and wear nutball outfits and everyone's in such a good mood and nobody cares if you finish first or last... they're just glad you showed up and had a wig on. i've gone to it every year since living here and have wanted to be in it after 5 minutes of spectating at my first one. but alas, i have not had the time nor gusto to get it done. but NOW, now i've got legions of 12-year-olds whose spindly arms and legs i can exploit to build me a floatable sculpture. and damn are they excited. two of my favorite nerds have already proposed the name "enterprise" for our entry, and today another student approached me to ask whether it would be ok if he missed the first meeting because he had a different meeting he had to go to. i said that would be fine and we would figure something out to make sure he could participate, but he wanted to make sure that i knew that as an eagle scout he had earned some sort of badge because he mastered the skills of welding and soddering. absolutely. there's going to be so much welding and bending of metals and harnessing of nerdy prowess to put this together. CANNOT WAIT.

new extra credit project

i have given my students another possibility for extra credit: a jheri curl. that's right. give yourself a jheri curl and you've got extra credit. where did this idea come from? well...

during my friday "lunch with dr. larson," i learned that one of my students (tim) has recently been combing his hair with a pencil and is trying to grow it out all curly-like. i asked him if he was growing it like an afro... or a jheri curl and he and another student (matt) started laughing super hard. i then said that if either of them grew a jheri curl i would for sure give them extra credit. especially if it was really shiny. simon, also there for lunch, said that he would not grow a jheri curl. i told him he couldn't because he's white. he then said he wouldn't grow one anyway. i told them if he could grow anything it would be a jew-fro because he's Jewish and has curly hair. i thought matt and tim were going to fall out of their desks.

i forgot about these

things done in the past 24 hours:

1- yesterday soren innocently raised his hand during drill and said "um, dr. larson, you're missing the "t" in element." apparently i had misspelled the word element. my response? i threw an eraser at him. bad because i'm throwing things at him, even worse because he badly sprained his finger playing basketball and it's wrapped up and he's got use of only one arm. he laughed nervously after i threw it. i then remarked that i probably shouldn't throw an eraser at him when he's only got one working arm. or maybe it's the perfect time.

2- same class.... i said something funny and nathan c. made a super laugh gaffaw-type laughing sound. i looked at him with my serious dr. larson death look and his face melted from complete joy and elation to utter fear and anguish in about 0.23 seconds. he looked like he was going to start crying. of course, this caused me to start laughing incredibly hard. hard enough that i doubled over and my face turned red.

3- there's a 7th grader that i really don't like. today she walked past my room and shot a nasty look in. i out loud said "i'm going to punch a kid in the face." yah....

science fair expectations blown

tonight i am reading the science fair results of my students. they're doing a pretty fantastic job making graphs and documenting their experiments with photos and diagrams and such things. so, just when i'm getting bored with how great things are, ms. lowe delivers her sweet results to me. her science fair project was on what causes stomachaches and how they could be relieved with a mixture of water, sugar, baking soda, and vinegar. i tried telling her, but she insisted this would be a good project. some highlights:

"The results of my experiment came out as a success. The first person I tried this on was my mother and the first trial it took about thirty seconds to work. For the second and third trial the experiment worked almost insantly. When my mother took the solution she burped loudly right after she drank the solution on the first trial. On the second trial my mother went ot the bathroom right after she drank the solution. On the third trial my mother went to the bathroom and burped a couple of times."

Next... her father....

"He burped after he drank the solution and some of his food came up after drinking the solution. The second time he drank the solution it work after after thirty seconds. He ran straight to the bathroom after drinking the solution."

Then... her cousin...

".. "the first time she drank the solution she burped and some of her food came up." " The second and third time my cousin just burped and nothing came up." "My cousin also ran to the bathroom."

And finally... the aunt....

"After she drank the solution she threw up a little bit in her mouth and ran to the bathroom."

But... ms. lowe concludes her results section with "Everyone's stomachaches went away which was the main goal for combining the water, vinegar, sugar, and baking soda."

hmmm.... may be some confounding variables in this experiment. and i so hope her folks come to the science fair. poor people and their poor stomaches will never agree to be guinea pigs again.

science art

liquid chromatography = pieces of colored paper that one's science teacher can piece together to make pseudo art. to be displayed in the exclusive 3rd floor science hallway this week.

purple plague

there were a couple reasons i knew meditation was a must before starting the school day yesterday: 1- yesterday was ravens day at school, 2- i had a morning meeting with my principal, and 3- apparently i was going to get showered in shit. ravens day = so much purple. everywhere. faculty and student wearing purple shirts, jerseys, kids spray painting their hair purple, purple shiny shit all over the desk in the school office, hats, purple pants. madness. i wore my usual black and when my principal saw me (wearing a huge purple track suit and hat and purple lipstick) she asked me if i was a steelers fan. no. i am not. i am not a football fan. she was gobsmacked. nope.. don't like the ravens and don't like this plague that has descended on the school. how do you take someone seriously when they're wearing a fucking track suit to work? and a purple track suit at that? sure, i may have permanent scarring running up and down my arm, but i'm not draped in a tent of windbreaking fashion faux pas. i understand that a football game holds an exceptional amount of importance for you, but don't think that because i'm not personally invested in the accumulation of points in an endzone means that my life is suffering in some way.

so after the meeting with the garnet gem, i went up to use the faculty bathroom. i flush the toilet, and instead of the water doing what it was supposed to do (get sucked into the pipes), it came shooting out of the toilet, straight up into the air, and on top of my head. ON TOP OF MY HEAD. i'm locked in a 5 x 5 x 8 foot cube being showered with shit water. like a hip hop car video gone awry. so there i am, screaming in the bathroom. i finally got out and told the 7th grade assistant principal about it. he looked at me like i was out of my mind. i then left his office and told the super nice janitor lady about it and she started laughing incredibly hard. as she should have. it was insane. before starting class, i told each of my classes about it and told them each of them were getting a hug before they left.

A-HA!

i have finally discovered who drives the palin pornography-littered miata that finds itself parked in my school parking lot every morning. i don't know her name, but i know her by her HUGE fur coats she wears to school, the sneery way she talks to me, and the 45 degree angle she holds her head at at all times. Also, thanks to her skirt selections, i am quite familiar with too many square inches of her thighs. it's her. i gasped and said "oh my god" when i saw her scooching out of the car this morning. interestingly enough, prior to heading to school this morning, i watched a news program that featured snippets of the latest palin interviews. wow. the insanity continues. HOW THE HECK CAN YOU NONIRONICALLY THINK PALIN IS OK? and not just ok.... awesome enough to decorate the back of your stupid car with her stupid name. she needs to be punched. so hard. i honestly can't get over it. you're basically saying "hey... you thought palin was stupid, obtuse, and uneducated? well, i'm even WORSE because i think the things she says are fantastic enough that i need to let everyone else know how great i think she is. she just makes so much sense. and don't you think mexicans are gross?"

in class, we're starting to talk about methods of heat transfer: conduction, convection, and radiation. i've set up a big fish tank with room temperature water and today experimented with setting up currents by adding colored water of different temperatures to see how they moved and settled in the tank. this resulted in a tank full of yellowish water by the end of the day. when my last class asked what was in the tank, i told them i peed in it. they laughed... and i said i was serious. they looked a little nervous, so then i told them i was just kidding. i was setting up convection currents using different colored water. they sighed in relief, and i quickly yelled "AND THEN I PEED IN IT." teaching. so great.

whitest teacher ever

i have officially raised the bar of whiteness.

one of my students showed up with fronts yesterday. fronts meaning those gold teethie things that fit in your mouth. i noticed something was up when it looked like he had fangs hanging out of his mouth. today i asked if i could see them. he then smiled at me and revealed oh the gold. so much gold. i asked him if they were permanent and he promptly took them out of his mouth to show me that they were not. i then asked him whether he could open cans with them. oh the giggling. he said no, and i then asked him if he had tried. again, no. well... maybe you should try. i asked him what he would do if someone tried to steal them and he looked at me like i was crazy. need i remind you that he is TWELVE. TWELVE-YEARS-OLD and wearing fronts. he also has homemade tattoos on his hand.

but it gets whiter. our subject of late is specific heat, or the amount of energy (heat) it takes to raise the temperature of 1 kg of material 1 degree Celsius. The lovely equation that goes along with specific heat is Q = mCΔT. when writing the equation on the board, i wrote mCΔT and remarked that he's a super underground hip hop artist. you know, MC ΔT. i then told my students i bought one of his mix tapes out of the back of someone's car. and it was super hot on the street. oh, you guys don't know about him? guess you're not street. i also told them the rapper TI named himself after Ti (initial temperature) and that his new album is called "Specific Heat." almost lost my cool when someone asked me if that was the album he was writing from jail. why yes... yes it is. i went on to describe how there's actually a lot of overlap between hip hop and thermodynamics. that hip hop artists get a lot of inspiration from the likes of Boyle and Faraday and physical science and during set breaks the artists are callibrating their thermometers backstage.

Pulley Bling

1- Did you see Dick Clark on New Year's Eve? Not as much "Rockin' New Year's Eve" as "Strokin' New Year's Eve." And by strokin' I mean the cerebrovascular type. The group of friends gathered at my house to watch the event were absolutely dumbstruck by his appearance. And slurred speech. And plastic face. It was like the world was moving in slow motion. Slow, grinding motion permeated with the sound of some former music icon's moans masquerading as enunciations. We all sort of looked at each other, wondering if 1: WE were that wasted, 2: HE was that wasted, or 3: the Mormors from Planet Xzulap had finally invaded and chose Dick's Clark's body as the first to occupy and turn to Earth plastic. None of those turned out to be the case... although a part of me is thinking he's faking the whole stroke thing and just got super wasted and hoped for a sympathy screw.

2- Apparently my students now carry pulley bling around school. Pulley bling = lots of different colored metal pulleys. Not only does one of my students carry 10+ pulleys of various colors and shapes in his backpack, he also carries 50 feet of nylon rope. When he mentioned this to me, his classmate (and academic rival) quickly announced he not only had 50 feet of nylon rope, he had an additional 100 feet of other kinds of rope in his bag. We are now hoping for a fire drill during their class with me so we can rig up an elaborate pulley system and lower students out of the windows to safety.

SCIENCE!