Small Wonder
Small Wonder
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Tag Archives: School
Staring Into the Maw of Draco
My Orthopantomogram
The Weather Channel this winter got the cutesy idea of naming winter storms. This is in imitation of the National Weather Service’s habit of naming tropical storms. Hence, the name Draco, for today’s bad weather. Last night, we had thunderstorms. Today, we have high winds, falling temperatures, sleet and blowing snow, as the center of this massive storm passed over Saint Louis. So far, the ground is too warm for any of this oobleck* to stick.
Dan and Annie flew in from the left coast and were surprised by Draco’s less than warm welcome. Dave is driving down from Purdue tonight; I pray that he is careful driving. Tomorrow, Rey arrives; he is just passing through town on his way out to Colorado, but will spend the night. He should remain below Draco’s freeze line.
This is the last week of school, before Christmas break. Anne and here kids are anxiously awaiting Santa. I arranged for Santa to send a video message to Anne under the guise that she was one of her fourth grade students. Here is the link to the Portable North Pole video that I made for her. Unfortunately, Anne didn’t think sharing this with her students was such a good idea. Anyway, watch it, I hope that you enjoy it! I knew I should had marked her down as naughty and not just naughty and nice.
A orthopantomogram or dental panoramic radiograph is a panoramic scanning dental X-ray of the upper and lower jaw. The one pictured above shows a two-dimensional view of my mouth. It uses tomography to flatten the half-circle it circumscribed from one of my ears to the other. This particular device consisted of a horizontal rotating arm which held the X-ray source and another moving arm that held the digital X-ray sensor. They were arranged opposite each other. The patient’s skull, my head, sat between the generator and the sensor. I bit on a plastic spatula so that all my teeth, especially the crowns, can be viewed individually. The whole orthopantomogram process takes about one minute. My actual radiation exposure time ran about six seconds as the machine took its excursion around my skull.
Being the dedicated blogger that I am, I had to take a picture of the resultant photo. Other than this brief moment of technological gee-whiz-i-ness, the rest of my checkup was the usual fare. Trying to converse with someone who was holding sharp metal instruments in your mouth and who also thought that you should really devote more of your life experience to flossing. The white spots on my upper outside teeth are old fillings.
* Bartholomew and the Oobleck is a book by Dr. Seuss. It follows the adventures of a young boy named Bartholomew, who must rescue his kingdom from a sticky substance called ‘oobleck’.
UPDATE: Dave made it as far as Springfield and decided to lay over for the night. Anne couldn’t get into her car after school, because ice had frozen the door shut. A ‘nice’ man offered to help her and succeeded in breaking the door handle off instead. His excuse was, “That was always a possibility. Is there anything more that I can do to help?”
F in Exams
Math
Find x
The elementary school tragedy that occurred in Connecticut hung like a pall all day on Friday. Some of my co-workers, the parents of similarly aged children were visibly sickened by news of this event. After work, I exposed myself to the media coverage, which had gone ape over this story. I was on my way to the MRH school district’s teacher Christmas party, to meet Anne at the Wood, I turned it off quickly. The teachers also sympthized with the victims of this tragedy, but they weren’t going to cancel their Christmas party, because of the actions of one gunman. That would be placing too much emphisis on an act by a man that craved such attention. Besides, the media frenzy was doing fine.
Physics
Hannah sprays her new bike purple. The spraying of the bike gives it a negative charge and the paint a positive one. Why is this?
Positive – Spraying is easier than using a paintbrush.
Negative – Purple isn’t a good color for a bike.
The Wood is a trendy new bar in the ever more trendy Maplewood. It used to be a Laundromat. That ought to give you a feel for the exploding coolness of what was once Dan’s backyard. The already well lubricated faculty meeting was well underway when I arrived. Anne introduced me to her friends, while I sucked on my Urban Chestnut Wing-Nut ale. A political diatribe is brewing for this blog, but that beer quenched my political fire, at least for now.
Chemistry
What is a vibration?
There are good vibrations and bad vibrations. Good vibrations were discovered in the 1960s.
The graphic test question at the top and the interlude questions afterwards, all come from Richard Benson’s book, “F in Exams”. It is subtitled, “The very best totally wrong test answers”. I love that he has covered it Blue Book blue. On the cover the F in “F in Exams” is handwritten and circled with a big red felt tip teacher’s marker. The questions are all text printed, but the answers are hand written too. The doodles in the margins are great.
Technology
What is a computer virus?
An STD – A Systematically Transmitted Disease
After we made it out of the Wood, we headed off again to Left Bank Books in the Central West End. Anne wanted to pickup a book that she had ordered, but it hadn’t arrived. This is one of the pitfalls of local booksellers. Amazon would have had this book speeding to the eventual recipient days ago. On the other hand, if she had dealt with Amazon, she could never could have shown me Benson’s book. I’ll leave the correct choice of booksellers as an exercise to the reader. Please show all of your work.
History
Explain what is meant by the term “pastoral farming”?
It’s a farm run by reverends.
Cap-Pun[c|k]
Drake Among Fall Leaves
A national teachers union wants to create a rigorous professional exam for K-12 teachers that would serve the same function as the bar exam for lawyers. When I told Anne about a ‘bar exam’ for teachers, she said that she knew plenty of teachers that could pass an exam at a bar, say at Las Palmas, The Wood, or even the VFW Hall, because they have cheap beer. We all know that on a teacher’s salary cheap beer is an important consideration when it comes to bar exams. Anne of course, was only joking about the teacher’s bar exam. She then announced that she has fourteen days of school left until Christmas vacation. Excuse me, I mean winter break. I’m left wondering what took her so long to first voice her countdown.
Anne is healing slowly from her bicycle accident last month, but Anne tends to do most things slowly, except when it comes to things she wants to do and I am only lukewarm about. This is especially true early in the morning, but I digress. The title of this post is derived from the shorthand for capitalization and punctuation. Anne usually proof reads my post, but since she has been hanging with the fourth grade for so long, her once stringent editorial standards have relaxed a bit. After reading yesterday’s post, I asked her if she saw any errors. She said my Cap-Punc looked much better than her fourth grader’s and then she reread the post for content. Woo-Hoo! I’m smarter than a fourth grader. Wasn’t there a TV game show based upon that premise? [Fifth grade, fourth grade, what’s the difference? Why let the facts get in the way of a good story?] Maybe more accurately, I can claim: I write better than a fourth grader.
So, with my laze about day, except for all of the bicycling, I had the psychic energy to write a second post, this one. It’s after dinner and Anne the family chocolatier asked me if I wanted chocolate for dessert. I said that that was a stupid question, but then I corrected myself and said that there are no stupid questions. Anne then corrected me again, there are no stupid questions, just less than inspired ones. Like when after she has explained an exercise to her class and asks, “Are there any questions?” This response is less than inspired stupid [IMHO], “Can I go to the bathroom?”
Anne clued me into the following YouTube video. I guess as counterpoint to the rant that she voiced and I recorded. In my way more humble opinion, I choose now to recant. Maybe, I am not smarter than a fourth grader. I’ve got to believe that somewhere in Dalton Sherman’s ancestry, there is a preacher man. He has the gift. I feel cap-punked now.
Oak Knoll Park Fountain
Oak Knoll Park Fountain
Oak Knoll Park is the closest park to our home. When the boys were young it was the go to place for open green space and playing outside. It even has a nice little playground. It is a Clayton city park, so we’ve always had to cross Clayton Road to get to it. This has led to a few heart stopping moments over the years.
There are two large houses in the park. These were once the private residence of two brothers. The large tyrannosaurus and triceratops figures that now reside outside the McDonnell Planetarium lived here, back in our own little Jurassic age. One of the two buildings was open to the public, it served as the Saint Louis Natural History Museum. When the Science Center expanded to the south side of Highway 40, the dinosaurs left, along with the Natural History Museum.
At the bottom of the knoll that contributes to this park’s name it a small pond. Anne always enjoys searching for turtles in the warmer months. Once there was a rather large stainless steel sculpture that was designed to rotate, so that it was always facing the sun. Its motion didn’t last long, but the sculpture hung on anyway. Now, it has been replaced with the pictured fountain. I went for a walk this week and snapped this picture.
Under the rubric of Anne teaching Pooh, I have another story for you. Anne passed out different colored slips of paper to her fourth grade class this week. Written on each slip were sentences from “Winnie the Pooh”. Students with the same colored slip were asked to order the sentences written on each slip correctly. After they had deliberated, Anne queried one of the groups, “Which slip should be first?” One young boy piped up that it should be his. Next Anne asked, “How do you know this?” He explained that his slip had the extra wide top margin that you would expect to see at the top of a page. That’s thinking outside the box.
Wednesday night was the big Powerball drawing. For the record, I bought a single ticket and I did not win. There were two winners and one of the winning tickets was sold in Missouri. That was all that was announced until later in the day. Thursday morning, the question on everybody’s mind was who was not there at work. I made the joke that the IT department had won, which elicited the desired sour expression among the gathered throng. Later I passed by the IT room and the door was locked. I had my own little sinking spell there and then. Later still I found the IT group. They were all losers like me, holding on to their day job.
Latté Ladies
Monarch Butterfly on the Beach
GET WELL SOON!
Dear Ms. R,
I hope you feel better soon! I know that you’re such a good teacher and we don’t want you gone. Did you go to the hospital? Well, that’s all I have to say. Get well soon!
Your student,
M
Anne went back to school on Monday, after missing last Friday, and finished up her school week on Tuesday. Also on Monday, the above note was waiting for her. It is from one of her darling twenty-some fourth grade students.
I planned on giving Anne a ride to school on Tuesday, so Dan could have a car for the day. So, I got up with her at oh-no-dark-thirty. I was doing my best impression of a zombie, from Dawn of the Dead, and heard an emphatic “Oh No!”
It turns out that Anne had forgotten to either get, or ask me to get, several items that she needed for school. Like a knight-errant, I volunteered to go to the store for her. I transformed myself from a lurching zombie to a driving one and headed out. It was not quite six, so most of the service counters were still closed, but the in-store Kaldis coffee bar was open and I decided that I deserved a latté.
Somewhere between 3 AM and 6 AM there must be a magical hour. An hour where bartenders transform into baristas. Maybe this shape shifting barista was a little slow on the draw that morning. His inability to make change for the customer before me certainly spoke to a certain latency.
Bartenders are famous for doing three things well, serving alcohol, listening and offering sage advice, as in, “Sir, don’t you think that you’ve had enough? I think that you should go home. I’ll call you a cab.” Baristas, not so much. At 6 AM it is all about speed. Take the order. Make the drink. Serve it.
I’ve digressed though. I placed my order and I guess that the barista must have sensed my zombie like state and asked, “What brings you out this early this morning?” I said that my wife needed some stuff that she had forgotten to get. The barista response that I got was, “You should get an apartment.” I mumbled some sort of reply. Zombies aren’t expected to be particularly articulate.
Latté in hand, I set upon my scavenger hunt. Loose leaf paper, after staring at it for a minute or two, I figured out that I had found it. With hand sanitizer, I had to escalate to the night stock ‘boys’. Holiday cookies were tricky. Anne had told me that she needed twenty, because she had twenty students in her class. I joked about only getting nineteen, with such a joke on the table there was no room for error, especially since the cookies came in packs of ten.
When I returned home, I related the barista episode. Anne’s first question was, “Was she some cute something?” This jolted me out my zombie like trance. The cute young thing was actually a very male, 65-year-old retired Navy Petty Officer. I guess, I must have omitted that fact.
Anne went to school and told the same story in the same manner to her fellow teachers and elicited the same reaction. Her co-workers went so far as to suggest that the barista’s advice was based upon personal history, bad history. I have received and continue to receive major kudos from my significant other. I love ya, Babe!