"Do you think he smells like nachos?"

Teenagers are weird.

Exhibit A:  Before school started this morning my first period class spent five minutes sniffing one of my students because someone thought he smelled like nachos.  At first I feared that this was some kind of ethnic slur since the student is Latino.  But eventually I concluded that for some reason he must really smell like nachos at 8:00 in the morning because that was the general consensus of the many people who came over to sniff him.  Somehow I managed to resist the urge to verify this strange fact for myself.

Aerosol Adderall

One of the things I love about teaching seniors is that they are close to being adults - most of them can carry on interesting conversations, some of them know what is going on in the world, and all of them are taking on more responsibility for their own lives.  This supposed maturity does have its down sides and one of them is that many students with ADD decide to stop taking their medication.  I can't blame them for wanting to be free of the drugs - many of them are like zombies when on it and apparently it messes with their eating and sleeping.  However, a classroom filled with students with ADD who have never learned how to focus without the aid of medication can be completely overwhelming. 

That's why I've decided that I need to invent an aerosol version of Adderall (the current ADD drug of choice).  Too many students trying to walk around the classroom or escape to the bathroom?  No problem - just one spritz and they will all settle down.  Is a class of 28 students carrying on 15 different side conversations (yes, some people are in more than one conversation at the same time) - just give a little spray.  Are the non sequiturs driving you crazy?  Just use this product and you'll be able to do math uninterrupted.  Last period on Friday will no longer be a headache-inducing near waste of time!  It's the perfect solution!

Factorial Fun

Today my IB juniors were learning about factorials.  (As a reminder: 5! is read as "5 factorial" and means 5 * 4 * 3 * 2 * 1.)  Several said that they loved the exclamation points because it made the math more exciting.  For the rest of the period whenever the answer called for a factorial they would shout the number to account for the exclamation point.  So 10!/5! would be "TEN divided by FIVE."  As their hilarity grew it got a little difficult to tell the difference between "TEN" and "ten" but I have to agree that it did make for an exciting class.

Tomorrow they want to learn math that uses question marks...I think that means we're going to be inventing something.

New Record

I may have set a personal record for number of absences in one period.  My first period on Friday was missing 10 out of 25 students!  No, we haven't been hit with an epidemic of swine flu - I think that only one student was sick.  The others were seniors who were helping on the 3-day junior retreat, helping at the soup kitchen (a group of 10 seniors goes every Friday), or going on college visits.  This sort of absenteeism is so typical for our school that I've decided not to bother giving tests or quizzes on Fridays if I can possibly avoid it - it's just not worth dealing with all of the makeups.

Down to Two

My three person senior IB class has shrunk again - now we are down to two!  In some ways this class is a dream come true - two highly motivated, very gifted students who will tackle any problem that I throw at them.  Unfortunately I'm rather rusty on the advanced math, so trying to find some interesting problems that supplement the curriculum is proving to be a challenge.

We're zipping through the curriculum, so last Friday we took a break and spent the period figuring out winning strategies for various simple games, including Nim and a variation of tic-tac-toe.  (In a simple variation of Nim, two players take turns taking 1 or 2 stones from a pile of 20 stones.  The last person to take a stone wins.)  Unfortunately my students decided that now that they know how to force a win in each of these games, they can start hustling people!  They may be my only students who see how what I teach them actually applies to real life!

Laugh of the Day

From first period study hall...

Me: Why aren't you doing any work?
Student: I left my backpack in the hall during the assembly and someone stole it.
Me: Really??? [Kids leave their stuff all over the place at our school and theft is very rare.]
Student goes out in the hall and returns in about 20 seconds with her backpack.
Student: I didn't see my backpack the first time because my sweatshirt was on top of it.

Trivia Fridays

Three times a week we meet for 10 minutes in the middle of the day in small community (basically a homeroom).  Considering that our classes are 85 minutes long and lunch is only 25 minutes, I think having this extra break for students to talk with friends is a good idea.  However, other than reading announcements that my community of seniors couldn't care less about, there isn't much to do during that time.  So this year I instituted Trivia Fridays using the new response card system that the school purchased for each department.  I type up the multiple choice questions in powerpoint and then students use the "clickers" to record their answers.  The computer keeps track of the points for each student.  It's a fairly nice system and the students love it, but somehow I don't think when the administrators spent however much on this system that they envisioned it being used to play games.  Hey, at least it's being used!