Batting .000

So I am really excited about the Electricity unit we are starting in eighth grade tomorrow. The problem is that it requires a lot of materials...and I, of course, waited until today to shop for anything... I had a long list of random materials that I needed, so this is sort of how my afternoon went:
Staples--didn't have the laminating pockets I needed...nor did other Staples locations I asked them to check. Boo. Perhaps a trip to Office Depot will occur later this week. I am in love with my laminator.
Radio Shack--a successful trip overall, but they didn't have the bare copper wire I needed. Also, I asked the lady for 0.1 farad capacitors. She gave me 0.1 microfarad capacitors. I asked her if there was a difference. She said not much. I think she has no idea what she's talking about. There HAS to be a difference between 0.1 farad and 0.0000001 farad. I think I need to go back there.
Walmart--even Super Walmart disappointed me. No clothespins! No wire or galvanized nails. Boo.
Home Depot--galvanized nails, check. 24 gauge copper wire: negative. 32 gauge insulated wire: negative. And you call yourself a hardware store. psh.
JoAnn Fabric and Craft Store--Look at the name of this store. What do you think they specialize in? Fabric? Sounds good, I mean it's a huge store and appears to have every kind of fabric imaginable. Silk? Of course not. I mean, what do you expect to buy at a fabric store?
(the title of this post is what a friend told me I was doing after I told him about the above shopping excursions)

So then I was in a bit of a bind. The first activity requires a 10cm x 10cm piece of silk for each kid. How the h was I going to fudge this one? Lisa suggested Goodwill for a silk blouse. But that would have to wait for tomorrow. I started looking for a video to show in class tomorrow.

Then I decided to make brownies. While mixing these brownies, my stream of consciousness went something like this...Silk. Silk blouse. I could go to Goodwill during 3rd period tomorrow. I could send an email and see if anyone has an extra silk shirt. That's stupid, who has a silk shirt that they want to just cut up. What else is made of silk? Shirts...ties...SILK TIES!! I HAVE SILK TIES!!

You see, two summers ago I decided I wanted to make a skirt out of ties. So I bought a whole bunch off of Ebay. I got a box of God-awful ties that I was going to make a skirt out of (actually I was only going to use the cool ones). Buuuuuuuuuut....they've been under my bed for....two years. HOWEVER...a few of them are made of SILK!! Hallelujah! I knew I was hoarding those ties for a reason. Apparently God knew I would need them someday. Maybe this summer I should actually make the skirt... Most people are really confused when I talk about a skirt made of ties so here's an idea of what I mean:

This one is a little weird. I've seen better. But it gives you a mental picture at least. Hey, if you have any cool ties to donate, I'd take them. :)

13 days later...

Yowza, it's been a long time...

Last week was a really long one for some reason. Part of it was that the weather started getting nicer, so no one wanted to be in school. Plus track meets started, there was a field trip, etc, so no one was in class and the schedule was all messed up. Ugh. But one day I ran a track practice with the kids, and then I went to see them run at a meet too, so that was fun :)

A few weeks ago I took the 8th graders on a field trip to a magical place located just north of the city where they invent things... Except it's not like your normal office building or lab...it's more like walking into Willy Wonka's factory. For example, if you are working on children's toys, you work in a pirate ship. If you are working on outdoor stuff, then you work in this cave type place with a waterfall... Basically the kids thought it was Disney World. We were in the lobby and the guy was explaining some of the inventions to them. One was an attempt they'd made to make a cover for a pop can that would keep the fizz in after you opened it (you may have seen a similar thing for a two liter bottle...). So he was talking about how it was really difficult and they had to try all sorts of different things, and he grabbed a bag off of the shelf of things they'd tried.
FS took one look at the bag he was holding and the bag left on the shelf and his hand shot up in the air,
"You mean you have two bags of 'Oops'?!?"

One of the best parts was when the guy told us it was time to go inside and the kids all walked towards the door and he was like, "No, back here by the bookshelf." Then he pressed a button and the bookshelf opened into the wall revealed the inside of the warehouse that looked more like a town with trees and a stream and a castle in the middle. Quite amazing--the kids loved it!


FS had a good one in class today too. We were talking about sound...
Me: Once the volume of a sound gets above 100 decibels, it can damage your hearing. That's why you wear earplugs when you use a jackhammer...
FS: Who's Jack Hammer?


And last week I was in the restroom and ran into one of the track girls...
"Oh, Miss Book! Do you have a white girl brush?"
I guess you've gotta call it what it is...:)


And now the year is about to get crazier than ever with just four weeks of class left before finals week...I feel like I still have so much more I want to teach them! And people keep stealing my class time for track meets and stuff like that. Which doesn't matter in a normal school, because if three kids leave for a track meet, there are still 20 kids left. But if three kids leave my chemistry class...I don't have a class anymore! 70% of my juniors are in track too. This makes for some interesting weeks...

Hispanics and sexy food

Me--driving the 15 passenger van to golf practice.
Favorite Student--sitting shotgun

FS--Look at that Hispanic guy!
Me--I think he's Asian.
FS--No. Anyone who's not American is Hispanic.

Oh. Of course.


Kid who's Obsessed with Charmed--pulls out some of his Easter candy, a pretzel rod dipped in chocolate and covered in M&M's--"Miss Book, look at this! Isn't it sexy?"
Me--"Well...that's probably not the word I would have chosen to describe it..."


Overheard in the cafeteria:
(Today we had shepherd's pie for lunch--which translates into a pan of ground meat/corn/gravy and a pan of mashed potatoes.) "No! This is an insult to shepherds and to pie!"


And today in chemistry...
Girl Who Loves Pinesol--Snail's Pace [the kid who does everything slower than molasses], I'm gonna clobber you!
Me--You'd both better be quiet or I'll clop you in the chops. Hah, that's what my mom used to say...
Pinesol Girl--Tell your mom she's a G.


P.S. If you haven't heard Relient K's new album yet, you should. I am obsessed. I love clever lyrics.

as promised...if belated...

I know, I'm slow, but I was waiting for everyone's pictures...

So, here it is, your brief photo tour of our New Orleans trip :)

First, a before and after photo of the outside of the house we worked on for 1.5 days. The family's stuff had already been cleared out, so we worked on gutting it. We couldn't completely finish because the owner didn't want us to take the ceilings down (even though they were going to have to come down eventually...one room was really sagging), and there were two rooms with asbestos tiles on the floors, so we left those alone. These photos show how much stuff we took out...

And here are a few before/during/after pictures of inside:
This one is John and Clean Freak demolishing some walls.^ Note all of the stuff on the floor we had to take out in a wheel barrow. The whole house looked like this. You can see the water line on the wall in this picture.

And here's what the house looked like inside after we were done with it...


It was sort of a strange feeling...to be destroying everything there even more...to make room for something new to take its place. Especially as I compared it to what I've done on mission trips before--build houses in Jamaica. Sort of reminded me of Ecclesiastes 3:3... "a time to break down, and a time to build up." I could wax philosopical on that for awhile, but I'll let you think about that for yourself :)

And this picture is too cute to pass up. Speaks in Noises, like most of the kids, experienced his first airplane ride/airport experience on this trip. It looks quite overwhelming from this angle...

Hmmm...I don't really have any good pictures of the other work we did...plus it looked pretty similar to to above photos: gutting, cleaning up after gutting, etc.

Overall: great experience. And for all our worrying about financial matters...we had more than we needed. God is always good that way :)

Happy Easter!

a tip

If you ever come to a point in your life when you have the opportunity to write the paragraphs that teachers read to students for the listening portion of a standardized test...
I implore you: PLEASE do not, in your attempt to be multicultural, name one of the characters "Mr. Wang."

It will only cause 8th grade boys to laugh while their proctor is unable to read because she is giggling.



Also, avoid dangling modifiers. There's nothing that makes me cringe quite like reading a grammatically incorrect sentence aloud. Especially when it's the part of the standardized test that the kids are listening to so they can answer the succeeding questions.

did you know...

Oh the things I've learned from the 8th grade boys this week...

Obsessed with Charmed sits at my lunch table. On Monday he told me with confidence that they were hiding Osama bin Laden in some local caverns, since no one would ever think to look there. I suppose that's one of the last places I would think to look if I were ever to play hide-and-go-seek with Osama.

Today, as I was introducing the video we were about to watch ("Great Black Innovators") FS asked some good questions. We were talking about how it was often hard for African American inventors to get recognition for their inventions because of the color of their skin. He wanted to know why: 1) Black men don't get paid as much as white men, and 2) Why when they have advertisements to help poor people they always show pictures of black kids. Valid questions which we didn't have time to discuss. But they did spur Cartoon Character Kid to pipe up:
"Yeah! And when they advertise for food stamps and stuff they always talk about agriculture. Does that mean black people?"

I honestly couldn't tell if he was serious or not. But as the whole class was correcting him, I wasn't even trying to keep a straight face...whoops. :-p

So Elijah McCoy was a black man who invented the automatic lubricating machine, which people didn't want to use when they found out that a black guy invented it, even though they needed it. They did a brief clip on him in the video, and afterwards Boy With Girl's Name asked what an automatice lubricating machine was, so I was explaining what it was used for. FS chose this opportunity to put in his two cents:
"You don't know where lubrication comes from? Condoms!"

Of course. Why didn't I think of that?