Catching UP

At the beginning of the year, I handed out stars to the students to write one thing they wanted to improve on during the course of the year.  I collected them on the students' way out the door.  Ricky came to the door, looked at me with a puzzled look on his face, patted all his pockets in his oversized jeans, and said, "I think I left the star in my other pants, hold on..."  then laughed and said, "JUST KIDDING!" 

C...R...T...

Starting the review part of the year for the dreaded CRT's (state tests) in April, I decided to give my students the words that go with the acronym CRT.  I thought that more knowledge might help them to be more comfortable with it.  Before I could finish my question of "what do you think CRT stands for," a student said "Critical Retarded Test!!!"  Personally, I think he hit it dead on.  It's critical for our schools to stay in business but it's retarded in that it tells us nothing about our students.  Love my seventh graders and how their minds work!

Warm Fuzzies

A student told me today, "Miss Wynn, this is the first time in 3 years that I have been challenged in Math and still like it."  Everybody all at once...one, two, three....awwwwwwwww.

Flip what?

Giving directions in front of the class today, I told my students to turn to the back cover of their books.  One should never assume meaning with 7th graders...I was hoping that common sense would dictate my students to look inside the book for information.  Not one, not two, not three, but 10 students in my first hour class flipped their entire books over to have the back cover facing up...  It's needless to say that I changed the way I gave those directions the rest of the day. 

Sad and Fruity

Standing in front of my Smart board, the projector light started to go out.  What I didn't realize, is that I had "changed colors."  One of my students raised his hand and said "Miss Wynn, you're blue!"  Yay a teaching moment right?  I asked him if he was saying that figuratively or literally.  We had a good discussion on the difference between the two terms. 

Trying to push their brains to think a bit more, we started thinking of some synonyms for the figurative meaning of "blue."  The most common answer was "sad."  I wrote the word melancholy on the board while asking my students who thought they knew what it might mean.  I was hoping they would use some context clues from our conversation to get the meaning.  One young man, used some different word clues in his answer.  "Miss Wynn, would that be a type of cantaloupe?"  After what seemed an eternity I finally figured out that he got this definition from the first five letters of the term..."melan" which he thought to mean "melon."  I had to give him credit that he did use parts of the word to decipher the definition.....So the next time you feel sad or "melancholy," take some comfort in that some 7th grader just thinks you're fruity.  :)

Smart Seventh Graders

Quiz Question: Miguel wants to put a fence around his square garden. If the garden covers 81 ft2, how many feet of fencing does he need?

Quiz Answer:  A WHOLE lot.

Quiz Question:  Jen rents 5 movies. She will watch each movie once. In how many different ways can she choose the first and second movie to watch?

Quiz Answer:  Flip a coin or ask a friend.

Dyslexic Barbie Dolls

I was introducing similar figures to my honors class today.  One of my students asked, "Well what does proportional mean the same?"  I answered with my wealth of useless knowledge (ha!).  Somewhere in my 27 years, I remember someone telling me that if Barbie was a "real" woman (go ahead...make the Pinocchio reference..."I'm a real boy!") she would be something like 7 feet tall and weight 100 pounds with an 18 inch waist and legs that made up 3/4 of her body?  I used that to tell my students that she is NOT proportional to a real woman, but that those measurements would be proportional to the Barbie as a doll.  One of my students made a very astute conclusion after hearing her height and weight, "She would be dyslexic!"  I replied, "How would you know she couldn't read?"  His response, "I thought dyslexic meant she didn't eat!"