Learn Me Gooder (3 page)

Most of the kids laugh at my joke, but every year I hear a small, “Awwww!”

Today, we were going over the homework and I noticed that one of the problems had coins that were all showing a tail side. There was a quarter, a dime, and a couple of nickels. I pointed this out to the kids and advised them that they would need to be able to recognize the tail images as well as the heads to get money questions right. We agreed that the quarter has an image of an eagle, and the dime shows a picture of a torch. Then I asked what the image on the back of the nickel was. Most of the kids shouted out, “The White House!” but in my afternoon class, Mickey beat them all to the punch, shouting out, “That’s the big jail house!”

Sadly, no. A nickel might be the hourly wage for someone living IN the big jail house, but it does not display such an image. And E Pluribus Unum is NOT Latin for, “Don’t drop the soap.”

Ella was having other money problems on Wednesday. I spent about ten minutes with her on what started out as a simple question.

She had written “200 cents” as an answer for one of her questions. I asked her, “What is another way we could say that?”

She stared at me uncomprehendingly, so I tried to clarify. I said, “That answer is not wrong, but usually when the number is that high, we use a different unit for money. Can you say 200 cents a different way, using that other unit?”

She thought for a moment and then responded, “200 dollars?”

Since cents and dollars are not the exact same thing, her response began the long, complicated discussion of how many cents are in one dollar. Getting that answer out of her was like pulling teeth. Teeth that apparently would have wildly fluctuating values for the tooth fairy.

I asked Ella to imagine that she had one dollar in her pocket, and I asked how many cents that would equal. She corrected me and informed me that she actually had SEVEN dollars in her pocket. My mistake.

I tried a different tact. I asked if she were to give me one of her dollars, how many cents would I need to give her for it to be a fair trade? One cent was her answer.

I immediately made the trade and moved on to the next student.

Just kidding. I continued my gluttony for punishment and jumped back into the conversation.

“So you could give me one dollar bill, and I could give you one penny, and that would be fair?” I asked.

Her head said no, but her eyes said she had no clue.

Ella’s next guess was that one dollar was equal to twenty-five cents. So I took a quarter out of my pocket, placed it on her desk, and asked, “This equals one dollar?”

“Four cents?” was her reply.

Although she was grossly wrong, I thought I understood where that answer had come from and that it meant she was at least stumbling towards the right path. Sure enough, when pressed further, she confirmed that she had gotten that last answer by adding the quarter four times.

So I asked her to write down twenty-five cents four times on her paper and add them up. She did that and came up with – gasp – 100 cents.

“Yes, one dollar equals one hundred cents!” I confirmed. “So how many dollars would TWO hundred cents be worth?”

“Seven dollars?”

At that moment, I honestly felt like I was stuck in the middle of a MasterCard commercial.
“Math Journal – One dollar and fifty cents.
Demonstration Quarter – Twenty-five cents.
Incomprehensible Mathematics Conceptual Error – Seven dollars.
Bleeding head wound, caused by pounding my head on the surface of the desk – Priceless.”
Talk to you later,
Seven Dollar Billy

Wow. Those guys at LaserTel sound like a bunch of winners. Bring them down to my classroom sometime and we can all conference together. That way, maybe Ella will finally learn what 200 cents is equal to, and the LaserTel guys will finally learn that 200 cents will only buy them about an eighth of a heat pump. Until then, it sounds like we both should buy stock in Motrin for banging our heads against solid objects.

Also, please tell Tom Winter that his suggestion of screaming, “SHOW ME THE MONEY!!” in Ella’s face is not conducive to a learning environment.

Did I tell you that I have a hemophiliac in my class this year? No, that’s not a girl with a Wee Willie Wahoo – that would be a hermaphrodite. Hemophilia is a condition where the blood doesn’t clot properly.

It’s actually a very big deal, because if Lance got cut, or even scratched, he might lose a lot of blood before it could be stopped. Accordingly, at the beginning of the year, Nurse McCaffrey brought a passel of paperwork around to all of Lance’s teachers explaining the condition and making it clear that he was to be sent to the clinic immediately if anything ever happened.

You might think then that Lance would be a very methodical, reserved, careful child. You might also think that gold plated ceramics make a nice Mother’s Day present. You would be wrong on both counts.

Lance is just as reckless and rambunctious as they come, and I’m amazed that I haven’t had to send him to the nurse every day.

The lucky streak ended today, though. I was passing out a worksheet to all of the kids, when from behind me I heard someone cry out, “I’m bleeding!”

This proclamation was not shrieked in horror or screamed with any sense of pain or urgency. It was more in the tone of someone impatiently waiting to place a food order – “I’m ready now!”

My heart stopped for a second, and as I turned around in slow motion, I thought, “Please don’t be him. Please don’t be him.”

Sure enough, it was Lance, looking down at a paper cut on his finger. A paper cut, that most minor and insignificant of scrapes. It’s the Detroit Lions of bodily injuries.

Nevertheless, a paper cut could be disastrous for someone like Lance, so I flew into action. “Go to the clinic! Now! No, you don’t need a nurse’s slip or a hall pass! JUST. GO. NOW!”

I got him out the door in about five seconds. As I was walking back to the center of the room, Jessie, who also sits at Lance’s table, said, “I think I have a paper cut, too.”

“Oh, you’ll be fine,” I said, without even glancing at him.

That Teacher of the Year distinction will NOT elude me this year!

Switching from quick bleeders to slow thinkers, I encountered yet another concrete example of the lack of problem solving capabilities that I am facing this year. As we were switching classes, one of the girls in the afternoon group named Chassany came into my room bawling. I escorted her out into the hallway and away from the class to give her some room and some time to compose herself while the rest of the class got settled in and started on the word problem up on the board. Then I went back out to talk with her about what was going on.

Chassany told me that she was crying because she had gotten in trouble with Mrs. Bird for talking in the hall. I asked her, quite rationally I thought, what she could do to prevent that from happening again. She stared at me, dumbfounded.

I prompted her, “Do you have any ideas?”

She just gave me that miniscule shoulder shrug that seems to speak volumes. It conveys everything from, “I dunno,” to, “Frankly, I don’t care enough to even pretend that I’m interested in attempting to think of an answer to your question. Also, I have no idea what your question even was.”

I spoke as slowly and as calmly as I could. “You got in trouble for talking in the hallway, right?” I asked her. When she nodded, I continued, “So what do you think you should do so that you DON’T get into trouble again?”

Nothing but a blank face. She had absolutely no answer for me. It’s not like she was being sullen and refusing to speak. She really and truly didn’t have any clue how she could avoid getting into trouble for talking in the hall.

Awesome.

Oh, and have I mentioned that Chassany is obsessed with my hair? Every time I talk to her, I can tell that her eyes are focused on the top of my head. She seems to have no interest in the buzz cuts, fauxhawks, and “booty fades” worn by her classmates, but for some reason my haircut fascinates her.

Today’s conversation was no different. Even through all the tears, I could see her glancing up above my forehead.

I just wanted to shout, “Excuse me, young lady, my eyes are down here!”

I will admit that when my hair is cut short, like it is now, it can look a bit spiky in front. I suppose in addition to weathering Chassany’s stares, I’ll have to be on guard against scraping Lance with a sharp lock of hair.

That would not look good on a résumé.
Talk to you later,
Flo B. Woodson

Like I said, I’m amazed that this was the first time I’d had to send Lance to the clinic. FYI, I’m pretty sure I can’t just duct tape him to his seat to keep him out of harm’s way, as you suggested. Not everybody appreciates the full spectrum of uses for duct tape.

You’re right, Ron Philby would not qualify as a hemophiliac, but he definitely is a hair-o-philiac. And here I thought enough time had passed for people to forget that I didn’t start using hair gel until I had been at Heat Pumps for a few years, and that my first couple of attempts were less than smooth. Please inform Latya that my student, Chassany, merely stares at my hair. She doesn’t constantly point at it and shout, “There’s something about Mary!” like HE did.

Today, I just wanted to pull all of my hair out. My kids this year seem exceptionally low. Maybe I’m practicing selective amnesia and choosing to forget that I ALWAYS have this opinion in September, but I don’t think so. It feels awfully early for me to already be weighing the option of a career in online marketing.

I gave a math test today, and the subject was addition. There were several computation problems that allowed the kids to show (or disprove) their mastery of basic facts and regrouping (what we used to call carrying), a couple of word problems, and one short answer question.

There weren’t many issues with the computation problems, as these were pretty simple, and most of the kids understand regrouping when it comes to addition. Several kids are still counting on their fingers, but at least they are coming up with the right answers. Even Priya, who goes out of her way to be a time sink in class – she once stopped the class after I wrote 15 + 7 = ? to ask, “What are those two lines?” – understands regrouping and even got both word problems correct. (“Those two lines” were the equal sign, by the way.)

The word problems were very basic, and it was obvious that the entire test was over the topic of addition. Still, that didn’t stop Franco from subtracting on one of them, even though the question asked for a total. Two other students added numbers that weren’t even in the problem. That’s just sloppy.

Word problems, even simple ones, are always sticky with my kids because they either can’t, won’t, or don’t want to read them carefully. However, reading looks like their strong suit when you compare it to their writing.

The last question on the test was free response, and it said, “What is the math word that means ‘the answer to an addition problem?’”

Before the kids began the test, I talked about this question, hoping there wouldn’t be so much confusion. I told them that I just wanted ONE WORD that is the special math name for the answer we get when we add. This is a word that we have spoken nearly every day in class.

Out of both classes combined, I had 15 kids that wrote the correct word, “sum.”

Here are some of the wrong answers I received:
Add (so obvious, yet so wrong)
Math addition (as opposed to social studies addition?)
Altogether (a helpful clue word, but not the answer)
Forty thousand ninety three (only for a very specific addition problem)
OGO (guess who wrote THAT one!)
The plus sign (the ANSWER is not called the plus sign!!)
Mr. Woodson (kiss butt much?)
Shug you whorek (at first, I thought I had been insulted in Klingon, but then I realized Joaqim meant “show your work”)

Really, this is just laziness. As far as vocabulary words go, “sum” is certainly one of the easier ones. I can’t wait until we get into the subtraction words. Subtrahend and minuend – those sound like words straight out of a horror movie.

On an unrelated note, I just saw that I could be making $12,000 a month selling real estate from the comfort of my office chair. It’s something to consider.
Talk to you later,
Add ‘em Ant

That’s right, I called Priya a time sink. Heat sinks, which we are intimately familiar with, draw away heat from a source. Time sinks, like certain children I know, draw away valuable minutes from a lesson, dispersing them to the four winds, never to be reclaimed again. My time sinks are highly efficient, too!

Once again, it’s Monday, and as some people my parents’ age once sang – Monday, Monday, can’t trust that day. As opposed to Friday, which I would trust with my life, my banking password, and my vintage Star Wars action figure collection.

Still, the Mondays of this year, as well as most every day, have been made brighter by a certain ray of sunshine in my class. Her name is Katie, and she always seems to have a smile on her face. There have been several mornings when I have been ticked off well before 8:15 am – kids not having their homework, kids somehow needing to trade pencils ten times in ten minutes, kids insisting a triangle has four sides – and when I’ve walked around the room like a sourpuss. On these occasions, Katie always has a way of looking up from her morning work, catching my eye, flashing her brilliant smile, and then going right back to work.

After that, there’s just no way I can remain angry. At least not until Lakeisha opens her mouth again.