Yes! Yes! Yes!

I love me some rubber stamps, and have a creaky and dusty drawer full of them. Some are motivational, some include puns (like "You rule!" with a ruler underneath), all are amazing. The one I was using today for checking submitted homework after school was simply the word "YES!" inscribed within a 5-pointed star.

I came across a very lovely poster of the various groupings of ecology, from populations to biomes, that was perfectly drawn and colored, so instead of the obligatory stamp-to-stamp-pad-to-paper journey, I decided to apply my teacher brush a few times in succession! This unintentionally led to the following phrase in big, inky green letters across the poster:

"YES! YES! YES! YES! YES!"

And then I laughed a great deal and hoped no one would laugh the same way when they saw it, too.

Thoughts are Critical

"It is quite possible and, unfortunately, quite "natural" to live an unexamined life; to live in a more or less automated, uncritical way. It is possible to live, in other words, without really taking charge of the persons we are becoming; without developing or acting upon the skills and insights we are capable of. However, if we allow ourselves to become unreflective persons — or rather, to the extent that we do — we are likely to do injury to ourselves and others, and to miss many opportunities to make our own lives, and the lives of others, fuller, happier, and more productive."

-CriticalThinking.org (teacher homework)

I need to promulgate the importance of critical thinking, lest my kids become more uninformed citizens with voting rights. Shoot, this will be tough.

Decimals

I would fucking die if I had to teach math. I realized that kids are having trouble learning metric conversions because they don't understand how to use a decimal.

Me: Let's say you have the number "1", where do you write the dot/decimal/point/*any other synonym possible*?

Him: 0.1!!

Me: No.

Her: .01?

Me: No?

Him: 0.1?

Me: You just said that. Still no.

Him: Ohhhh 1.0!

Me: Yes! So how do you write it on your paper?

Him: *Writes 0.01*

Me: Wait what? No!

*5 minutes later, 50% of the class understands how to write the decimal to show that "1" is the same as "1.0"

Me: Great, now what happens if we have 43? Where do we write the decimal? Hint, write the decimal on the RIGHT SIDE of the last number.

Them: .43? .043? 0.043? 0.43? 4.3? 1.0? 7? 34?

This is not what I meant when I said I like working with numbers.

Still Here!

Has the Large Hadron Collider destroyed the world yet?

hahahahahahahaha

Metric System

My kids found this interesting, and so you will, too.

This is a world map with 3 countries shaded: Burma, Liberia, and Moi.

Why are they shaded? They are the only 3 nations who have not officially adopted the metric system as their primary system of measurement. Among industrialized societies, only in the US do our gas-guzzlers guzzle gas by the gallons versus by the liters.

Considering that the international language of science is dependent on the metric system, this fact alone drops us down a rung on the path to science literacy for all.

I mean, how do I get kids to learn how a centimeter is related to a micrometer when they be all, "centiwho?"