Lord, give me the length...

Our focus for this week in science is strength and direction of forces.

This morning, when I asked my homeroom what "strength" meant, I was met with nothing but blank faces. Of course, I often encounter this even when I ask what "subtraction" means, as my homeroom tends to be a really lazy, really low, really apathetic group.

I prodded the group by asking, "Doesn't this word sound a little bit like 'length?'"

"Oh yeah!" they replied.

"And do we remember what 'length' means?" I asked, fully expecting for them NOT to, as they did NOT remember what congruent or symmetry meant earlier.

But a few did venture, "How long?"

So I tried to scaffold even further -- "So if Length means how Long, and they both start with the same letter... then maybe STRength means...?"

Almost all of the kids shouted, proudly even, "How long!!"

I'm gonna need to get me some extra long Tylenol for the rest of this year...

Risky Cycles

MAN, it is cold down here! You wouldn't expect to hear that coming out of the heart of Texas, but as I stood outside at my early morning duty post amid the falling snowflakes -- wait, you wouldn't expect to hear THAT coming out of the heart of Texas either...

But it's true, it was snowing this morning, and the temperature was in the mid-20s. I don't care where you're from, that's not a lot of fun to be out in for half an hour. I expected the kids to start greeting me with, "Good morning, Mister Popsicle!” And when I got back inside, looking like the Comingeth of the Iceman, the first thing my Assistant Principal said to me was, "You know, it's supposed to be in the teens tomorrow morning..." Time to break out the nuclear-powered longjohns.

In other news, I walked a bit of a fine line today with both of my classes. In the science book, there was a picture of a unicycle. So I took that as an opportunity to talk about prefixes. We were just talking about how quad- and quart- meant four, and the kids know that tri- means three. So I ask them what other word looked a lot like unicycle. They came up with bicycle pretty quickly. So I had them consider what a unicycle looks like and what a bicycle looks like, and I asked them to try to think about what uni- and bi- could possibly mean. They had no problem with that. But as an adult reading this, you can probably see the fine line I was talking about.

Much like the rookie gambler pushing all-in with a jack-10 off suit, I realized I was taking a bit of a risk, but I went ahead and asked the question anyway -- "What other words can we think of that start with uni- and bi-?”

Thankfully, and as I pretty much expected, both of my classes came up with the same words -- unicorn, and bilingual. One little girl did say that bi means when you go to the store and spend money on something, and a boy in the other class suggested “Bye-bye, Mister Teacher.”

But no one brought up the more sensitive word. I think you know which one I'm talking about.

Biplane.