Thanksgiving morning putzing around

He's dressed for the business of the day (sleeping, eating, crying, diaper changes, whining, laughing, having his hair combed, being forced to stand up by mommy, books)

it always comes back to this

It looks like last year's "digital entropy" freak-out has resurfaced AGAIN just in time for the holidays.  Popular science lays out the best way to store information, and it looks like platinum and desert burials are moving to the top of my wishlist.

This day before Thanksgiving was spent writing a video guide for a short piece on recycling, which meant that I went really deep into internet research on trash.  I legitimately like working on curriculum projects, but it's hard for me to come out of the rabbit hole, you know?  So the video is basically a 2-minute PSA encouraging recycling, but once you start thinking about waste, there are so many subtopics within subtopics that can be mined and explored.  I cut it off at E-Waste because I could feel myself being one topic removed from the base level, which was recycling.  I think trash and waste is one of my favorite things to think about within the realm of environmentalism.  Where trash/sewage goes when it's done, shipping barges down to Mexico and back, our attitudes towards reuse vs. newness.  When we talk about it in class, it becomes apparent that most teenagers are grossed out by the idea of a thrift store as anything other than a place to procure ironic, throw-away items for halloween costumes.  There's such a bias against reusing stuff/buying used based on socioeconomic norms.  After that, I wrote many letters of recommendation for college, so there was that.

Anyway, Hanukkah is upon us, and it is the first time we are going all out in celebratory gift-giving.  I have purchased many, many small gifts for Natan's family members and our small family.  I would also like to point out that if I am given the task of doing Hanukkah, then I will buy both a real Menorah and a window gel menorah, along with dreidel gift bags and wrapping paper that says, " I ❤ U a latke".  So far I am killing it at Hanukkah!

day is done

Thanksgiving break has commenced with a pretty epic day. For starters, coffee cart was waiting and the caffeine was a-flowin’. Next, I taught a class that approximately 200 grandparents walked through over the course of an hour. It was the closest I’ve become to being a zoo animal and I did not like it. There was a thin layer of nervous perspiration covering my body the entire time. Imagine if 200 people came to casually watch you do your job! It was too much. I then had a 10 minute break before being peppered with intense questions about human population growth from my AP class, during which I had the sad thought that teaching that class can sometimes resemble a dissertation defense prep. You never know what they’ll ask! They’ll ask things you can’t answer (“How do you actually calculate the I in the IPAT equation?” I DON’T KNOW. It’s more like a philosophical concept and less like a mathematical equation? Geez, go watch some Hannah Montana. These kids today! They have buckets upon buckets of knowledge. I was proud to fully understand fractions in high school.)

Finally, I got home and watched a video of the child of an old girl scout buddy performing a "dramatic interpretation of the star spangled banner” at a talent show (What even is that? If Theo performed such a thing, it might be grounds for disowning, unless of course it was done ironically, with a bald eagle shaved into his head. I mean, really? Haven’t they heard of magic tricks, dance routines or joke telling? LIKE NORMAL KIDS?!! I’m going to go out on a limb here and suggest that the parents had a hand in suggesting this display of “talent”). This was immediately followed by a text from a favorite cousin about a literal bald eagle sighting and an e-mail from my alma mater proclaiming that they have the most national merit scholars of any college (To which I say, way to make old alums from less competitive times look good?  It's disheartening to know I would have a snowball's chance in hell of getting in now.  And does this mean my peeps diorama competition is going to get way tougher in the future?)

DAY IS DONE. (gone the sun. from the lake, from the hills, from the sky) (girl scouts represent)

Things about MS Office Suite that excite me (boring post ahead)

This past week was marked by two significant Microsoft Office breakthroughs:

1.  A drastic change with respect to my philosophy behind the design of a powerpoint presentation.  Just let me say that I may never put a word on a slide again--only pictures from here on out!  We all know that too much text, bullets, boring/unsophisticated fonts and slides without pictures are bad, but I have been recently educated further about the most effective slides—simple, one image and no more than 140 characters (like twitter!) that are on top of a contrasting background.  It makes me feel like an ancient schoolmarm to look back at all of my old powerpoints and contrast them with my new way of thinking.  Of course, this means my presentations might have 50 slides to explain a simple concept like exponential growth (previously 1 slide), but the research says they will be more effective (or so I've been told)!  Here, I present my new PPT style:

 

So clean, so simple, so many google image searches are required now for every slide.  These 2 slides used to be only half of 1 slide.  What was I thinking before?!

2.  Word 2010 has the ability to do math type and equations (which I just learned, even though the software has been out for a while. D'oh)!  It’s made my worksheets for 16 year-olds so much better looking.  No more backslashes for dividing and asterisks for multiplication.  Behold:

 

It’s funny how you can sort of get into whatever software you’re using for your job, even though it is definitely not important to your life on the whole.  At one point, I was really into Statistica and now I’m into the MS Office Suite, I guess.  One thing I do know is: Garamond forever!

Jambo!

Yesterday our school had a visit from some Massai warriors.  Today I read an article about the commodification of their crafts in National Geographic.  Today I was on a field trip to the Monterey Bay Aquarium where I did some serious relaxing in the deep ocean tank.  I did a lot of thinking about pictures and how important I think they are.  This came about as I was watching the deep sea fish swim around and reminiscing about my snorkeling on the great barrier reef and wishing that I had a better visual to supplement my fading memory of that experience.  Even the emotional memory fades so much with time.  Then I thought about my childhood and how I remember only bits and pieces and how I wished that I remembered more.  What I do remember is basically the stuff there is photographic evidence of--holidays, swimming, family stuff.  The stuff that I am more easily reminded of--what if I had no pictures?  It would basically be a blur of made-up stories, I think.  I understand the revulsion that some people have at photographing everything, but I feel like taking pictures actually helps me understand the experience better. It makes me pay more attention to everything that's happening in order to figure out it's essence.  I guess that's why I like real cameras so much more than cell phones--it's the deliberation in the act of taking a photo, and a different and more mindful approach to the picture than the cell phone (that takes no deliberation or forethought). 

 Some people like their jellyfish to be symmetrical, I prefer the chaos of the egg yolk jelly.

 Standard MBA shot.

 This guy was out, about and magnificent.

 And this guy is in prime play-ready position.

repeat offender

The best thing about this little guy is that he needs no convincing on the merits of sleep and will literally go into the bedroom when he is tired and ready for bed (as he did tonight).  He is also learning size relationships and loves to play with nesting toys.  It's interesting to see how quickly a child's preference for a toy will change.  This summer, he was all about books, and now he's all about nesting toys (with many others in between, of course). 

 Reading Goodnight Moon

Moving on to other things.

Thoughts Journal

In an effort to manage the barrage of random thoughts that go straight from the mind to the mouths of students in a certain class that I teach, I instituted the "thought journal".  The thought journal is for recording those thoughts that don't pertain to the topic at hand, but are instead the result of a wandering mind. Thoughts such as, "I'm hungry", "I like my socks today", "I'm getting paid this afternoon", "I wonder when class is over" are all things that are now being written in a special section of their binder, only to be read at the end of class if we cover all our material.  It's pretty great so far (1 day) and I think it's working (we got through the lesson with minimal interruption).  In honor of the thoughts journal, here are some that I had in the last hour:

When will I stop listening to our local hip-hop/top 40 station?
Is it weird for a nearly 40-year-old to know who Ariana Grande is?
Is platypi a word?
I'm confused--how old is Olivia Pope supposed to be?
Will Theo's manual dexterity get better when he walks?
Does IKEA still have the mini Christmas trees with blinking lights?
What do Kimye actually talk about?
I wonder what it's like in Iceland right now.  (to be honest, that's a daily thought)

What did you do this weekend?

Oh yeah? Cool, but my magnificent little dude managed to put two random objects in his mouth at the same time! (baby powder and nail clippers)

Raising the bar for himself, he then tried for three (baby powder, clippers AND wooden peg).

After all that, he went back to his standard practice with a megablok.

Exceling on TGIF

There are seven more working days until the holiday of giving thanks.  I can not wait because it means several things:  the semi-annual appearance of coffee cart at work and sleeping in until it is light out for five consecutive days.  I am teaching human population in APES, which has evolved at least one lesson that is a legitimately good use of excel in the classroom--population growth modeling.  It was pretty neat to see that Belize will double it's population within 30 years.   Also, the fact that our simple growth model can be applied to saving accounts and interest accrual was a perfect illustration of the power of excel (that it is useful for everything).  My only gripe about this educational endeavor is that the spreadsheet function in google drive (which is copycat excel) won't add trend lines, thus thwarting the learning of the few students who don't have excel on their computers.  Why is this?  (legitimate question).  At the end of the block a student said, "I used to hate excel, but now I love it."  And thus concluded a week of shaping young minds and skillsets.

Today I came home to this precious curly-headed baby perfecting the art of balancing his bowl on his nose.

hexpup

Hump day is over and my proudest working moment was when I devoted a little bit of class time to allowing students to log on to their twitter accounts and start following Neil Degrasse Tyson.  Science for the win!  I don't have much for you today, except this, the newest of Target's awesome gift cards--it's a hexpup!

another quickie

Salon ran a pro all-girls Catholic school snippet today.  If I had a daughter, I would hands-down send her to an all-girls school.  I am also pro-religious school because they are places that put an emphasis on the individual as one within a community and with an obligation to do good in the world.  There was none of that sentiment at the public school in which I worked (I guess there isn't yet a standardized test for being a good person.  SNAP!).  I also feel like, since the Judeo-Christian text (bible) has and does fundamentally shape our western world and national dialogue, it might be good to read it at least once (something that I certainly never did growing up and feel woefully uneducated about).*

 *This post created by a non-religious, pro-intellectual-rigor-and-being-good person.

oh brother

Today, in my chemistry classes, we put sodium in water.  This is a pretty standard chemistry demonstration that generates so. much. excitement.(!)  Do the elements on the periodic table hold even more mystery and wonder?...(is what you would be thinking if you were in my class).  A student was filming and things got a little out of hand (funny pun to go with video!).  I think she just filmed the opening to the Blair Witch Project sequel...a chemistry story of madness and mayhem.

VD

We went to the beach this weekend, which was nice and also perplexing as Theo refused to have a blanket on his cold feet (he also refuses socks). When we got to the car, he was a tiny little frozen icicle, but he didn’t seem to mind. (Does he have a high tolerance for pain? My DNA analysis may provide the answer!).

It is Veteran’s day and I am working, which is excruciating. I feel super good when I have the day off and Natan works and super bad when I’m working and he’s not. I don’t think our family could function with off schedules. How to people do it? I often wonder how a family functions without a least one teacher or SAHP to be with the kids during the breaks and 3 day weekends. I hope I never have to figure it out.

Today is at least an easy day, as I taught mini lessons to 8th graders about light and stars. I tend to go really off-topic when I talk about anything related to astronomy. I somehow wound my way from the electromagnetic spectrum to the fact that light takes 8 minutes to get from the sun to earth. This was within 2 minutes. It’s kind of like I turn into an astronomy fact doll and just spit things out (NEW INVENTION?!).

Irazu Volcano

Natan and I decided to go up to the cool mountains of Costa Rica this summer to go volcano hopping.  Unfortunately, we were both sort of gastrointestinally challenged and had to cut our trip short.  We did manage to drag ourselves to the rim of the Irazu Volcano and look reasonably happy, but don't let the pictures fool you--there were many bathroom breaks and a lot of nausea.  It felt great and refreshing to be in a cool place away from the oppressive heat.  I think we would be really good at vacationing in the mountainous part of the country.  The rim of the volcano had volatile weather--covered in fog, then completely clear 5 minutes later and then raining 2 minutes after that.
 

 Some homes in the mountains.

 We got directions from a dairy farmer and then he wanted to take our picture with his dog.

 The abyss.

I was wearing a plastic bag for warmth.

PT quiz

Listen, I recognize that I am totally phoning it in on this blog post, but it is early November, which is the toughest part of the school year.  I am tired and it's dark outside most of the day.  It's about now that Natan and I start thinking of all of the magical and fun things we can do in the summer!  It is the only way to making the teaching life work, I tell you!  Imagine having to plan 3 birthday parties, with supplies, games and a detailed plan every single day, in addition to hosting said birthday parties for 5 hours every day.  That's kind of what the job is like, but missing the grading and lab prep.  It is insane.  So today, in honor of exhaustion, I give you this: some questions about the periodic table from a recent chem quiz.    

Which elements would you expect to have similar properties?

     a.  C and Si                          

     b.  Cu and Zn                      

     c.  N and O                          

     d.  H and He

 

Which of the following elements is the most reactive metal?

     a.   Li

     b.   Fr

     c.   Ra

     d.   Ca

The separation of copper (II) chloride into copper and chlorine is an example of

     a.    distillation                                                            

     b.    fractionation

     c.    filtration                                                           

     d.    electrolysis

wordless wed.

(kid's got great posture!)

Manuel Antonio

Manuel Antonio Parque is very close to where my parents live in Costa Rica.  It took a while for Natan and I to realize that it was a really good day trip for us.  Also, it is very, very hot/humid, and the swimmable beaches are a 30 minute walk through the jungle, so by the time we arrived at the beach, we had to peel the clothes off and immediately get into the water in order to maintain homeostasis.  There are monkeys everywhere in the park, along with sloths.  But really, when you're that hot, it’s kind of hard to enjoy anything (except ice).

The monkeys in the trees!

 Spiders love the tropics

 Cute lizard

 On the way to the beach, we passed this stream.

 We beached ourselves here.