Arithmetic

We were seated alphabetically in sixth grade, and our homeroom was also our math and science class. That's how I got to spend so much time with Bobby Shaffer, a little twerp with a dirty blond bowl cut. His dad was my brother's little league coach, and father and son were both bullies on the diamond.

The classroom was not Bobby's field of dreams however, so he was a little humbler there, but still pretty scrappy. I remember one day overhearing him tell someone the mnemonic he used to spell arithmetic, a rat in Tom's house might eat Tom's ice cream.

It impressed me at the time, and to be honest I can't hear the word without thinking of that boy and that sentence. I never really considered the scenario, though. What kind of rat would be so aggressive as to assail your freezer? Or worse, come at you when you were eating dessert? Poor Tom! And why Tom, not Ted or Terry or Tim?

This morning all of these questions finally surfaced when, out walking the dog, I heard a dreadful banging in the trash enclosure up the hill. Something was clearly stuck in one of the heavy-lidded plastic rolling cans lined up within, maybe a raccoon or squirrel. I took Isabel back to the house and called on Heidi for back-up.

Armed with a broom and the long-handled garden tool known as a cobra, I held the stockade door open as Heidi lifted the lid with the broom. A brown rat scurried out and away from us, then through the fence and into the woods. As scrappy as it was, too, I was ambivalent about saving its pestilent life, but I was glad to have prevented one of our neighbors from the ugly shock of freeing a trapped rat when they lifted the lid to deposit their garbage.

Mission accomplished, I wondered as we headed home what a rat in Tracey's house might do and crossed my fingers to never find out.

Trouble-shooting Trouble

"I had the science fair last period," a student told me glumly at lunch yesterday. She was among a few kids either dropping off or packing up their books before heading down to the cafeteria.

"How did it go?" I asked.

"Only two judges came to me," she complained. "We were supposed to have three."

Before I could sympathize, another student who had been listening to our conversation spoke. "Maybe it was because your board wasn't as attractive as it could be," he said.

There was an audible gasp, and I'm sure my jaw dropped.

"That was really rude," one of the guys said to his buddy.

"What?" the other kid said.

"You just told her that her science fair project was ugly," another student said.

"I've never even seen her project," the student said, "I was just trying to figure out why the judges didn't come over!"

Mr. Snow Miser

I had already seen it happen once today, and so when what seemed like a serious snow squall gusted outside my classroom, I ignored the huge flakes blowing sideways and silenced the excited chatter of sixth graders anticipating an early release.

"I predict it will stop snowing and the sun will come out before this class ends," I told them.

They were skeptical as they returned to work, but sure enough, the storm tapered and then halted. Ten minutes later it was blue skies and sunshine. "Ta da!" I spread my arms wide.

"How did you do that?" they demanded. "How did you know?"

"Maybe she can control the weather!" one student suggested.

"Trust me," I said, "if I could? We would have a lot more four day weekends!"

Practice Accountability

It's something I tell my students over and over:

Skills are improved with regular practice. I use that argument to justify their daily reading requirement, often with the analogy that you'll get stronger by lifting 20 pounds every day, but you'll probably get hurt if you lift 100 pounds on Sunday.

I believe it when I tell them, and I shake my head when they don't follow through, but that was definitely me frantically practicing my ukulele for an hour before my lesson this afternoon, and for the record, I hadn't touched it since Saturday.

Oh, I didn't get hurt, but I have to confess that my lesson fees might be better spent should I actually be more prepared. On the other hand, I probably wouldn't practice at all if it weren't for the lesson.

Conflicted

Every week I give a little skills quiz to see how my students are testing on topics for which they are mandated to demonstrate mastery.

This past week it was on conflict-- they had to list the four basic types (character v. self, character, society, or nature) and then identify what type of conflict was described in a brief scenario. To their credit, most students did quite well (for those data crunchers out there, the pass rate was 90% and the average was even higher), but there were some misperceptions that we'll need to go back and address.

For example, my favorite incorrect answer was in reply to this: You can't decide whether to have spaghetti or tacos for lunch.

One student called that man versus nature, and even as I marked it wrong I couldn't help thinking that man! Those must have been some tacos.

Flasher Cards

One of the coolest things about giving every sixth grader an iPad is seeing the ways they find to use it to learn. (Of course, they are finding ways to use it NOT to learn, but the reverse is definitely true as well.)

Watching 80 people use something as simple as a glorified flash card app is amazing; all of its functionality is on display: some love the matching feature and try over and over to beat their best time, others prefer to practice vocabulary by filling in the blank. Many have discovered the dictionary feature embedded within, and some have even realized that they only need speak the words to make their cards.

This latter feature can be a little glitchy, though, particularly when one tries to use it in a room full of chattering sixth graders. Thus it was that I came upon one of my more conscientious students repeating the word dictate over and over into the screen of her iPad.

"I hate this thing!" she complained.

"Try saying it really slowly," the student next to her said.

Our class was ending, and many students were filing by her to put their English binders away as she enunciated the word in two elongated syllables.

"Oh my God!" one of her classmates said, and I looked over to find them both wide-eyed and giggling, looking at her device with bright red faces. "Here," he continued, and then leaned over her shoulder and typed d-i-c-t-a-t-e."

Pretest

A big focus of the quarterly reading class I teach is getting sixth graders to begin to identify theme as it relates to author's message. Most often, they want to boil it down to a moral or lesson, and that's a pretty good place to start. Today I read one of Dr. Seuss's lesser known tales to the class and then asked them to write down the message on an index card.

The story was "What Was I Afraid Of?" from the Sneetches collection, and for those who are unfamiliar, it is the truly bizarre account of a strange yellow (everybody is yellow in that book) nocturnal bear-like creature (the main character) who is (not surprisingly) terrified when he repeatedly runs into an empty pair of green pants that is able to walk, ride a bicycle, row a boat, and shiver in fear. In the end, he realizes that the pants are just as afraid of him as he is of them, and they befriend each other.

The moral of the story? According to the vast majority of my students it is Don't judge people by the way they look.

It could be, but here's the rub: I always ask them to test out their theories about theme by telling a story from their lives where they learned this lesson. Today? Not a single child of the 18 present could muster an anecdote of a time when they judged someone unfairly by their appearance. Neither have they ever been so unfairly judged, according to them.

Wow! Could it be that mankind has progressed that far?

Either that, or I have some work to do this quarter.