Steve Spangler: AWESOME
My latest internet obsession is Steve Spangler, the science guy who introduced that awesome Mentos/Diet Coke geyser experiment to the world. I am also seriously addicted to internet contests, and over on Steve Spangler Science, there is a fun contest going on.
Those of you with children – get over there RIGHT NOW and click on every single link. Sign up for the “Experiment of the Week” – it’s FREE. Make a comment and enter the contest!
I am so all over the “free.” All OVER it, I’m telling you.
When I was a little kid, I used to mix together all kinds of things in the kitchen, just to see what would happen. I was particularly fond of anything that had to do with baking powder and food coloring.
Steve Spangler has hundreds of experiments that you your kids can do in the kitchen or out in the back yard, and none of them cost very much if anything at all. With ingredients in your pantry, you and your kids can make the dry paragraphs in a science textbook come alive.
Kids love to make messes, blow things up, pop things across a room, stick their hands up to the elbows in goopy, swirly glow-in-the-dark goo, and make loud noises. Here’s your chance to encourage just such conduct, only with educational objectives as your goal.
Ah, obsessions. Steve Spangler, won’t you be mine? Sigh.
Check him out. He’s fantastic.
Bad Grammar and a Couple of Naughty Words, All Justified
Oh, good! Jeff’s blogging again! High time, cuz.
Hoosiers, don’t forget to take your ID’s with you to the polls. Indiana people don’t want no corpses or people too stupid to get an ID voting in OUR state. Real people only, please.
Color me cruel – it won’t be the first time – but I think ALL states should require a legal ID for anyone who tries to cast a vote. A valid, non-expired, legal ID with a picture on it that looks like you, thass right, you done heard me. If the pollworker is your mother, she should still ask to see your ID. No exceptions; that ain’t fair.
I need a legal ID to write a check at Domino’s, and voting is a lot more important than buying a pizza.
I do not consider requiring all voters to have identification to be any kind of infringement on my rights. I DO consider it an infringement on my rights if people who are too damn stupid to piss in a boot are allowed to vote with no questions asked.
That’s how a lot of these guys get into office, you know. Yup, that’s how they getcha.
Butter and Standardized Tests
I ran into a former middle school student in a store yesterday. I recognized him right away, in spite of the beard, the wife, and the three little kids, but for the first time, I couldn’t remember a student’s name. This concerns me.
My mind’s eye could see him with the years stripped away, and I could remember where he sat and who sat on either side of him. I could remember things he did and said in class, and I could remember his handwriting and where he liked to sit in the cafeteria. I couldn’t, however, remember his name.
He said to me, “I bet you don’t remember me!” And I replied, “Of COURSE I remember you.” Because I did, even if his name was gone from my brain.
He said to me, “I will always remember that one thing we did in your class.”
I replied, “And which thing is that?”
“Remember when you read that olden-days book to us and they were always eating and making stuff from scratch, and you taught us how to make stuff? What I remember most was the butter. My kids and I love to make butter, just like you showed us in 8th grade.”
The book was Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Farmer Boy. It was perfect for a low-ability class of 37 14-to-17 year old students, all boys, who hated reading and honestly couldn’t see any connection between something in a book and the outdoors/ hunting/farming/mechanic/taxidermy/4H/cattle-raising lives most of them were already considered experts in.
It was English class, but we cooked, and we whittled (GASP, how politically INCORRECT!) and we made sourdough starter and later we made bread with it, and we made pies and jerky and boiled candy (it’s just fudge or taffy) and jam. And about once a week, we made butter to go with our bread. I had a glass churn, but that was too complicated so we poured the cream into a big Tupperware thing and passed it all around the class and the boys shook it while listening to me read. I would read until the butter ‘came,’ and then the boys sprang into action. They poured off the buttermilk and squeezed the butter until it stopped weeping. They sprinkled just a little salt into the butter and kneaded it in. Then they all washed their hands and whoever’s turn it was that day sliced the bread and they all put napkins in their shirt collars and tucked in. We used KNIVES to slice the bread and to spread the butter. Heavens to BETSY.
I know that many of them were enthusiastic about this book because of the food, and they loved the food because all teenage boys love food, and also because these particular teenage boys were seriously hungry.
I loved those Laura Ingalls Wilder units. Other teachers criticized them because watching sourdough rise, and making butter, weren’t proper English lessons.
I maintained, and I still maintain, that anything we as teachers or parents do that makes learning come alive is a proper English lesson. Science lesson. History lesson. Math lesson. Life lesson.
I was sad when the principal forbade me to do this kind of thing any more. There really wasn’t time, anyway, what with all the ISTEP prep the boys needed to do. That was more important in the long run, right?
I ran into a grown man in a store yesterday who remembered those lessons and did them with his own children.
I’m sure he remembers and does the lessons required for ISTEP, too.
But I know for a fact that he remembers the butter.
