Are you smarter than a 4th grader?

This past October, my chemistry class put on an afternoon of Halloween-themed chemistry demonstrations and activities for 75 4^th graders. Exploding pumpkins, ghost eggs, glow-in-the-dark slime, and smoke rings were just a few of their favorites. A week later, I received a packet of 75 handwritten thank you letters. Each was a treasure and whenever I need a 30 second pick me up, I just read one at random.

What was most entertaining though was their creative system of spelling. This is more of an indictment of the English language than it is of our school system so don’t blame the teachers or the parents or the current or past administrations. And certainly don’t blame the students. How well would you do in a handwritten note without a built-in spell checker? Are you smart enough to understand the written language of a 4^th grader? See if you can figure out what word they were trying to spell (and have a chuckle on me).

	What they wrote	What they meant
	actaly	actually
	favioet	favorite
	exspeshaly	especially
	toatle	totally
	prodgects	projects
	liket	liked
	aprisheat	appreciate
	cristle	crystal
	home-maid	home-made
	uneake	unique
	favret	favorite
	dride	dried
	gosht	ghost
	alsome	awesome
	aswerm	awesome
	aswam	awesome
	asumwer	more awesome

Just in case you are worried about the future of our civilization based on these results, here is a quote from one of the letters:

Thank you for the interesting Halloween chemistry expirements. The irony of it is, your expirements use dry ice and you asked us questions about it and said that the CO ₂ were “ghosts”, but we already knew from science that it was Carbon Dioxide.

A 4^th grader even knew to subscript the 2 on CO ₂! The English language may be in jeopardy but the future of chemical science will be in good hands. And in case you think he spelled “experiment” wrong, I’m giving him the benefit of the doubt. After doing experiments all my life, I must admit that most would have been more accurately described as “expirements”.

3 of the 43 things that got in the way

Did I mention we are remodeling our ________ (fill in with your choice of kitchen, bathroom, closets, guest room, or floors). I suppose I should be happy that Kathy has finally accepted (after 3 years) that we might be in this house for a while to come. These past 2 weeks, the kitchen has been the "project of the hour". No kitchen remodel is easy unless you can turn it over to someone else and have it done while you are on a 4 week cruise.

The deal is that Kathy mustn't rely on me to do much of anything. If she can do it herself or find a creative (cheap) way to get it done, great. It sounds a bit selfish, I know, but I am up to my eyes in alligators with school. The last thing I need is a never ending remodeling story. She accepted the condition and, as usual, hit the ground running. As I can, I do help, though Kathy thinks I'm usually a wet blanket. To wit, the only thing she asked me to give her on her last birthday was a promise that I wouldn't whine about any of her projects. Hey, I can do that.

But just for the record, remodeling in general and remodeling kitchens in particular are Murphy's Law magnets. Take the past two days for example. I happened to get an unexpected 4 day weekend this weekend and so I volunteered for remodeling duty. Here's what I did:

1. Bust out the existing travertine kitchen floor. (OK, Vince did that, but I did help haul 15 5 gal buckets of travertine pieces to the dumpster).
2. Pick out a new tile to replace the travertine - great find, they will have the tile by 9:30 the next day.
3. Pick up seven 3x5 panels of 1/2 inch thick cement board plus mortar and cement board screws
4. Cut up seven 3x5 panels of 1/2 inch cement board to cover the subfloor
5. Throw out the 1/2 inch cement board because it would have made the tiles too high (meanwhile cursing myself and anyone else in earshot for not waiting to cut up the cement board until the tile came).
6. Send kathy to the hardware store for seven panels of 1/4 inch cement board
7. Patch holes in the wall necessitated by kathy's momentary lapse on where electrical outlets and light fixtures are going.
8. Did i mention that the whole floor thing was precipitated by a miscalculation of where the new counter was going which in turn was going to expose bare subfloor?
9. Cut up seven 3x5 panels of 1/4 inch cement board to cover the subfloor
10. Mix the mortar for the cement board
11. Notice that the cement board screws i bought are actually dry wall screws
12. Send kathy to the hardware store to exchange for the correct screws while i watch the mortar turn to rock
13. Mortar the cement board to the subfloor while Kathy screws them down (every 8"!)
14. Send Kathy to the hardware store for another 25 lbs of mortar (who would have thought that 25 lbs would only do half the floor?)
15. Screw the mortared subpanels to the floor while noticing that my electric drill keeps spitting out odd rings and busting phillips bits. Just hang on for a few more minutes I plead with the inanimate but essential power tool.
16. Showering quickly so we can go out to eat (even the microwave is buried now as is any seating within 30 feet)
17. Waiting for 30 minutes for a table.
18. Gulping down 3 glasses of water and 2 diet Pepsi's to attack the dehydration that accompanies bouts with K.R. (kitchen remodeling)
19. Jumping into the Jacuzzi because it seems our muscles are about to jump out of our skin.
20. Fix Kathy's computer so I can enter this blog.

I rest my case. Whenever "projects" happen, things "get in the way". QED. That's why I hate projects.

Minimum Time To Do Anything (MTTDA)

This week was parent-teacher conferences. My partner teacher Ross (based on his years of experience at High Tech High) suggested that we schedule two families every 15 minutes, switching off half way through. Something told me that I was going to have a hard time limiting each set of parents to just 7.5 minutes. After all, I have a lot more in common with these parents than most of my fellow teachers (not the least of which is actually having been the parent across the table). But I'm the new guy, what do I know? We started at 12:30 and by 4:00, I noticed that there were 6 sets of parents waiting in the hall and Ross's room was dark and locked. I'm coming to the conclusion that everyone has an intrinsic clock inside them that sets the minimum time it takes them to do anything. I conjecture it is a complex function of their attention span and their life experience. Ross's MTTDA (Minimum Time To Do Anything) apparently is no more than 7.5 minutes. After 20 conferences, it appears my MTTDA is in the 16.3 minute range. After 30 years of marriage, I can with some confidence estimate my wife's MTTDA is in the 5-10 minute range. She both starts and finishes things much faster than me. While I'm contemplating the 43 things that will get in my way, she is rounding the first turn. Now that I think about it, this could explain a lot.