Before Christmas break I told my access class (think homeroom) that we’d have to go outside and play 8-square when the weather got warmer. They did not know what 8-square was, and asked if it was like 4-square. I said only in-so-much-as a blizzard is like an ice-cube. Intrigued –more with the possibility of going outside than in playing 8-square– they have been incessently asking me (a) “What is 8-square and?” (b) “Could they go outside and play it, please?”

As Lauren mentioned, we’ve had some really warm weather lately, so yesterday I took them out. There was much rejoicing. Earlier in the day I had grabbed some seniors (we keep a full supply on hand) who remembered playing 8-square to come out and chalk out a “court”. Traditionally an 8-square court is laid out in a 2×4 grid, but we drew out a 3×3 grid this time. It seemed to work well.

The rules are exceedingly simple:

1. The ball must bounce in your square before you hit it.
2. You must hit* it with your hand(s).
3. You must hit the ball into someone else’s square.

None of the screwy rules you see with 4-square. This is a real man’s game (the girls tend to be as good as the guys). Acceptable exclamations include, “good show”, “bad form”, “nice hit”, “tough one” and “quit your whinin’”. It’s a good game for teaching kids to just take their lumps, because everyone “gets out” all the time.

They are playing with the huge “training ball” right now. Later on I’ll bring out the Tournament Play ball. It’s smaller and bouncier.

*You do have to explain that “hit” is a single momentary contact with the ball. Otherwise you get shoves and holds, which break rule 2 and get you out.

Every dance at Lincoln Lutheran is like this. Well, the High School dances anyway. At the middle school dances the shoes tend to stay on, because the girls might have to beat you in dodgeball after they dance with you.

A few dances ago I wanted to see what it was like, so I took my shoes off too. It was sort of liberating.

For the past 8 years I’ve taught them how to play chess, but over the years that has gone from a full day to a half day, to this year, when we would only have 140 minutes. So we had to do something else.

We did a little ‘airplane building company’ simulation. Everyone started out with $200 and they could buy paper (a quarter sheet was $100), paperclips ($50 small and $100 large) , tape ($50 per inch) and a variety of other items. Then they built their plane, tested it in the hallway and brought it to the gym to fly it.

At the gym they could fly it for distance (each yard got them $100) or for hang time (each second earned them $100). They could only fly each plane once, so after they earned some money it was back to the store to buy more supplies. Lather, Rinse and Repeat as needed and soon you’d have enough money to buy a full size piece of paper ($700), a pair of scissors ($1000) or the plans to make a different sort of airplane ($400 – $2,400).

Everyone seemed to enjoy it, and the top 6 companies got prizes. We had two groups this year and we split them by gender. We’ve never done that before, and it seemed to work really well. There was also a prize for the Most Artistic planes. When the boys group was up, there were 3 entries; the girls had 20 entries.

I was a little surprised that the girls liked it so much, but Lauren pointed out that there was shopping involved.

Update: Here are the files:

• Handout and Balance Sheet (.docx)
• Signs (.docx)

Incidentally, not one toddler has told me how much he likes it yet.

I got rid of the food, and presumably the mouse moved on as well.

These were 66.7% off, so I had to buy them.

There’s another part that’s not pictures. It plugs into an outlet and you plug whatever you want into the outlet. Then the switch turns it on and off from (and here I’m just guessing) up to 5 miles away. I’m going to hook one up to a flaky piece of equipment at school that needs to be reset about twice a week. When it gets flaky you just need to send it to time-out for a bit, but if you don’t have that much time, you can also turn the power off and turn it back on. The problem is that it’s not exactly in an easily accessible location.

But I can put the switch anywhere…

I was at school in the afternoon, and afternoon in the Summer is not exactly a productive time for me. Usually I make up for that by just heading home, but one recent afternoon I was feeling unproductive and it was only like 2:00pm. Luckily I had a fun little project I had been saving.

A quick trip to Ace hardware for supplies, to the school library to steal an amplifier, and a trip to the custodial storage closet for a ladder and I was in business.

The speakers went up surprisingly easy, and running the wire required only the normal amount of cussing. Now I’ve got 300 watts of sound piped through 12 speakers.

You might ask why I would need such a great sound system in a classroom. Well, I didn’t want any of our students to have to think too long or hard when anyone asked them who the rockinest teacher was. Also, it will mean that I don’t have to blast my desktop speakers when we show student’s projects to the whole class. Also, I am the rockinest teacher.

Our School Nutrition person was the vice-president of the Nebraska School Nutrition Association, and they had wanted a website for years and years. We broke the class up into a few different working groups and went to work. I think it turned out pretty nice:

As an added bonus, my principal came to observe the class when the students were meeting with their client to iron out some of the details of the website. It’s always good to have your principal watch when you’re not the focus of attention.

As an added added bonus, I have a lot of good pictures of food to look at when I’m hungry…

Next week I’ll start spending my time making up important sounding things to tell Lauren that I’ve been doing while she’s been at work. it takes longer than you might think.

But that’s not what I wanted to say today. I wanted to show you this not altogether disappointing video that some of my students made in Video Editing Class. It’s a rip-off of homage to a more famous video, but one that I hadn’t seen before…

It’s like Where’s Waldo, but you have to tell us what to find.

Many things were donated items that had to be weeded through, trash needed to be trashed, and some tables and desks were going to switch places. We bought Pepsi to provide strength!

I moved some desks around (the ones I’m standing on for the picture) and when they were away from the wall I saw something spooky.

Ladies and gentlmen, I would like to offer my first installment of a series I like to call: Is It A Dead Spider?

Is it?

What did you guess?
If you guessed “Not a spider, but a rolled-up twist tie”, then you win!

You’ll be able to continue playing this game in subsequent posts. It’s important to remember the spider bit for the next part of this long – and yet kind of pointless – story.

Lloyd was up on a ladder with his head in the ceiling so he could run some cable across the room. He called to me, “Hey, come up here. I want you to see something.”

“Is it a dead spider?” I asked.

He assured me that it wasn’t. I climbed the ladder and he said, “Look on top of the server.” I did and saw:

Lauren: It’s the frog that Beth gave you.
Lloyd: Not that. Look closer.
Lauren: (looking with trepidation) There is a spider up here, isn’t there?
Lloyd: No. Oh, maybe you’re not high enough. Go up a step.

I did and saw:

Hey! It’s Lloyd’s pocketknife that he lost months ago! It’s the CyberLloyd 2000, as we like to call it – with all kinds of tools on it for fixing computers. He was missing it for weeks and we finally just ordered a new one. Now he has two, isn’t that sweet?

And wasn’t this a long, drawn-out way to tell you, ‘Lloyd found his pocketknife on top of the server’?

She class was doing photography, and I’ve seen some of the pictures that they’ve taken in years past, so I know she does a good job of teaching them. They had also been talking about sculpture, so she combined the two into one field trip.

We went to UNL, which has a really lovely campus, and walked around from one sculpture to another. Donna would talk about the sculptures and they would take pictures. Donna would take them to them to the next sculpture and they would take pictures along the way. Donna would wander around looking a little lost (art teacher, remember) and they would take pictures.

We saw big sculptures:

With little, ancillary sculptures:

This was the final sculpture we saw:

I liked it, but I thought the wall behind it was cool too:

This particular hallway was Pirates of the Caribbean, and they hung a spider right at eye level, right in the middle of the hallway. I noticed this right away, and immediately (a) started a betting pool on how long it would remain hanging there and (b) chose “less than 12 seconds” in the betting pool.

I was amazed that it was still there after 1st period started. And again after 2nd period. Then at the end of Tuesday (we didn’t have school Monday). By Friday, I was no longer amazed –just really, really impressed.

Example: The first time we had show-and-tell in kindergarten, I had no idea what the protocol was. Apparently we were supposed to bring green things, and that morning there was this whole table up front just chock full of cool green things.

The teacher (Mrs. Spindler?) said something like, “Who wants to share something?” Well, I certainly wanted to share something – how about one of those cool green things on the table? There seemed to be plenty.

I circled the table a few times and made my choice – a green hand mirror. I held it up to show and perhaps tell something about it and Barbara Stroud shrieked, “That’s my mirror!”

What the what? We were supposed to show what we brought? But – I didn’t bring anything…… Mass shame ensued, but I’ve successfully blocked that out.

If you’re going to hold your own anytime soon, allow me to present a few Lessons Learned from ours:

• Advertise under “garage sales” in the paper instead of “computers”. You’ll hit your target audience better.
• Do not go from 9:00am until 5:00pm. You’ll have as many customers in the first 10 minutes as the last 5 hours. 9:00am until noon really seems about right
• We’ve been advertising that everything will be half price in the afternoon. I don’t know if this is really effective. I think some people think (a) they will come back, but forget or (b) that maybe what you’re selling is only worth half as much as you’re selling it for.
• It took 64 man-hours to get ready for the sale, but students (and alumni) did most of this. They are motivated to do a good job because they get half of the profit.
• Do not sell anything at all to the annoying guy who tries to get you to lower the price on everything and get a discount for buying a lot of items. If your prices are right, someone else will buy them.
• If you have too much to sell, stack them behind the tables and bring them out as things sell. Note: there will not actually be time to do this.
• Remember to order lunch.
• Write down (preferably in a sort of treasure map) where you’ve stashed things during the year.
• Price things to move. The very worst outcome is to have to store things for another year.

The event was deemed a success. We grossed something like $1,500.00, and everything went pretty smoothly. We couldn’t lock the doors this time, because NHS was doing something or other, so we had some early birds wandering in, but that seemed to work out okay.

*Used here in more of a sort of hopeful sense, rather than a strictly chronological one.

Honestly, aren’t you a little afraid of this guy? He could snap at any moment and rip your throat out. It’s that one crazy eye and laid-back ears.

Second little tidbit of the day, one of my guys asked me to get his paper ready to put in his pocket – “Can you fold this for me so it doesn’t get crambled?”

I’m going to try and work ‘crambled’ into my day-to-day conversations from now on.

Happy Saturday!

What I don’t tell them is that you should also pick a club that self-selects for students that you would like to have in your club. So my clubs have names like: Chess Club (first rule of Chess Club: You don’t talk about chess club), Recreational Mathematics or Codes & Ciphers.

This semester I’m doing Codes and Ciphers, and about 90 minutes before the first meeting of the Codes & Ciphers club we decided (In the middle of programming class) that we should start it off with a treasure hunt. So the programming students, half of whom are alumni of the Codes & Ciphers club, put together a treasure hunt that went splendidly.

I didn’t want them all running around the school like a herd of cattle, so we made the first puzzle the hardest. Everything was in the form of riddles (because we hadn’t learned any ciphers yet) but the first one was written backwards. This spaced them out by about 5 minutes. The first riddle sent them searching under the tables in the commons. There were three riddles there, and each one sent them off in a different direction. So now I had them separated in time and space.

The third clues were all outside and were all the same, “What is between the brush and the saw?” At our school one of the computer labs is located between the art room and the shop. Once they got there they found a website address on the board which contained the next clue. That clue sent them back to the start where I had scrounged up some cookies for prizes (if they had written down all of the clues).

They loved it, and I overheard some of them later telling everyone that their club was, “The. Best. Club. Ever.” Missions accomplished.

Lather, Rinse and Repeat: I should never have to break in a new class again.

You’d think it wouldn’t take years to think of that.

Every morning I get a small piece of card stock, fold it in half, then put it in my back right pocket. It stays with me throughout the day and when I realize I need to do something later, it goes on the list.

“Are you writing something on your list?” the preschoolers ask.

“Yes,” I answer.

“Because you forget stuff, right?” they respond.

“Right.”

They know me so well. One of my least favorite characteristics is that I only remember something when it’s right in front of me. As soon as I switch surroundings *poof* – gone. The list helps quite a bit, plus it’s so satisfying to cross things off.

Back to the paper: Card stock has so much going for it. It’s substantial, so it’s not a little wispy paper that will get frayed and crumpled being pulled out of my pocket so often, and it’s quite satisfying to write on. I used to have a stash of index cards that I guarded like they were made of gold, but someone recently donated a whole box of card stock strips that I have cut down into a ten-year supply of future lists.

So, is it unhealthy, or do other people feel passionately about their writing supplies? (Don’t get me started on pens….)