Mental Floss

Too Good…

September 8, 2010
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Usually the source of most of my material for this blog is what happens in the classroom. I sort of depend on the shenanigans of my students to generate the entertainment element, if you know what I mean… The comedy material this year has so far been pretty thin. This bunch, for the most part (so far), shows up on time with their stuff, and they mostly listen attentively, with only the occasional stick-whacking to bring a few of them to heel. The “sit and stare” phase — you know, like the first day of school, when they just sit and stare at you while you jabber away; your best material is met with embarrassed smiles — is lasting a lot longer than usual this year. They might be too good. (Be careful what you wish for.) I mean, they haven’t yet really even settled into having separate class identities. Right now it’s hard to tell third period from fourth or fifth, except that I am a lot hungrier during third period, which is right before lunch. First period is easier to distinguish, because it’s has the most kids (every desk is full and we use every clicker), and they’re

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Scrape that Mucus Off Your Brain. (Also: Now I’m the Straight Man.)

February 27, 2010
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Scrape that Mucus Off Your Brain. (Also: Now I’m the Straight Man.)

Science “lesson” today. It’s Friday, so that means the weekly test, the suspense over whether they will score the 28/40 necessary to avoid the dreaded SSI (when the results were displayed today, one girl who made the cut did about as much dancing as one could do while still remaining seated), and best of all, mental floss. Help Me Scrape the Mucus Off My Brain — Ween Every Friday before the test, we scrape the mucous off our brains by mental flossing with some trick questions, math tricks, logic puzzles, Wacky Wordies, and etc. They’re all extra credit, and guessing is encouraged. Some are tricks, and some ain’t, but if it looks like a trick, it probably is. Today ‘s set saw the return of  another here’s-an-example-of-why-it’s-so-hard-to-learn-to-spell-in-English: What’s so unusual about this sentence? (Be specific.) A rough-coated, dough-faced, thoughtful ploughman strode through the streets of Scarborough; after falling into a slough, he coughed and hiccoughed. (Hint: Read it out loud.) Since I know how most (of my) seventh graders seems to have math issues, I also used one of my old looks-like-math-but-really-isn’t questions. I don’t tell them it isn’t a math question until

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“We interrupt this tragedy to bring you some comedy…”

February 8, 2009
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Selected exchanges from Friday’s mental floss: What musical instruments are represented below? a)  P O b)  BA BA c)   ECLART d)  @ # $ % “What do you mean, P an’ O?” “John just gave us the answer, didn’t he?” “I did? Make me say it again.” “The answer to B is not sheep.” (Half the class) “D’oh!” (Furious erasing and crossing out.) “Since when is a sheep a musical instrument?” One genius did say, “Bagpipes!” Add together each of the defined words to get a whole new word. Example: to shout + what you say when you feel pain = yellow. a) A light brown color + to leave = b) Vehicle + an animal pal = c) A store’s announcement + a type of women’s clothing  = “What’s a pall?” “That’s pal.” “What’s a pal?” Furious waving to be the first one for c. “SignBra!” Wacky Wordy: What phrase is represented by the following? Look kool XtXhXeXrXoXaXdX “Look cool!” “What about the rest of it?” “If you look cool, you don’t need it.” For more mental floss, head on over to Brainscramble.com.

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Lines of the Week (Sandwiches and Spanking?)

January 31, 2009
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Just a few choice seventh grade lines, sort of Art Linkletter stylie. From Wednesday’s vocabulary pretest: 1. The sub was slow to realize when something was ____; he thought everything was fine.  a) forlorn  b) amiss  c) apathetic  d) earnest  e) crestfallen Now I’ve used this one before, and I can’t remember anyone not knowing I meant substitute teacher. But this year… “On number one, you mean sandwich, right?” “Sandwich?  What?” “Sub. You mean like sub sandwich?” “Ummm. No.  Substitute. Guest teacher.” (Pounding head on podium.) Now I hear other murmurings: “I thought it was submarine…You know, like they didn’t know it was leaking or something.” From Friday’s Mental Floss: Sid and Nancy were comparing information about their siblings. At one point Sid said, “My older brother was born on the Fourth of July. I remember the day because I was watching the fireworks.”  Nancy immediately knew it was a lie. How did she know? The Mental Floss really frustrates some of them. In a good way. There are some who almost never get any right (there’s no penalty for guessing; it’s all extra credit), but most of them get this one.  Most of them.  “Micah” was waving his arms

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Random Featured Post

“Do you love me?” (Also: Weird “Week”)

Wotta “week.” Considering how tired I am, I can’t believe it was only a three-day week – for some reason we had a 4-day weekend for Veterans’ day. And I done clean forgot that I was supposed to give the “District Benchmark Test #1″ (that’s a whole ‘nother post) by Friday. So we spent Wednesday darkening ovals to generate data for the district, AND there was a “multi-media” assembly that, amid the rock and rap, touted the beauty of trust and honesty (also: don’t do those things which I obviously can’t mention, because ads for them started appearing here). AND, yesterday was “parent visitation day.” Whole lotta scare quotes today too. Usually I get a pretty good turnout for these parent visitation days (it sounds like a Catholic holiday). Our previous principal (our present principal is an FNG, both to the job of principal AND to our school) instituted these as a sort of PR for parents. Many parents of ms’ers are more than a little leery of sending their little angels to the big bad junior high. (You should have seen the reaction a few years ago when the district proposed making our school 6-8. OMG. You’d have thought [...]

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Mr. Coward has been teaching on the beautiful central coast of California since 1989.

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