Unique Math

Let's start with a word problem:
Sally is on a road trip with her parents. She is making a list of all the different state license plates that she sees. So far she has seen 27 different state plates. How many more of the 50 states does she need to complete her list?

My student knew to subtract, but since the 27 came before the 50, she tried to do 27-50. Then, finding that she couldn't subtract 2-5, she borrowed from the ones column. Her final answer was 76, and she at least saw that it didn't make sense. Still, she maintained that she had done the work correctly.

I laughed and laughed at her unique math (she laughed too). This is the same student who insisted that 130 divided by 8 was 1 with a remainder of 780.

In fact, for a while all her long division was done on the "find an easy number to use and accept a huge remainder" method. Which means that she did 39 divided by 7 and got 2 remainder 25. While this is technically true, it's very bad math.

Another student was introduced to the concept of right angles. It confused her because she then wanted all other angles to be wrong angles. When I explained that there are also acute and obtuse angles, she was really lost. Besides this, if she was looking for right angles and picked one that wasn't a right angle, her answer was wrong. The angle, on the other hand, was not known as a wrong angle.

I don't know why I try to teach them math.

Merry Christmas

Yes, I know it's too soon. It's also been too warm lately. Today, though, I was looking through my Chapter's wish list and tentative cart (I have a couple gift cards to spend and I've been trying to decide for weeks what I want), and the cart is mostly Christmas stuff. And now I'm listening to Christmas music.

It seems that the month doesn't really dictate my thoughts. I've been thinking about Christmas, partly because of tentatively planning the Christmas program. Also, one of the moms at church returned a stack of Junior Church lessons that her boys hadn't returned (although they maintained that they had). One of them had the youth 2011 Christmas concert readings in it.

Also, I've been thinking about "the light shines in the darkness and the darkness has not overcome it." That's one of my favourite parts of Scripture because no matter what happens, there's still hope. There's still light; darkness cannot defeat light.

Merry Christmas.

Getting Ready

I've had a pretty nice break from church related stuff this summer. There was no Sunday School and no Junior Church. I was in the library pretty often, but that's my happy little hide away, and I didn't feel rushed to get there. It's been nice.

Now, though, it's time to start getting ready for fall. Today one of the other teachers and I sat down and planned the first few weeks of the new Sunday School year. We have lessons through at least the second week of October, and plans to write more in a few weeks. It feels nice to be prepared and it's good to have someone else to talk things over with while we write lessons (although his wife thinks we'd get further faster if we talked less and wrote more!). This year both our classes are doing curriculum based on The World-Tilting Gospel by Dan Philips. It's more work for us; until a couple years ago we all did a set curriculum that was all ready for us, and even last year when I did Worship and Wisdom, the lessons were based on my school notes and were much easier to write. It's good stuff, though, and we're both excited about teaching it.

I suppose I should start getting Junior Church materials ready for September as well. That's not really a lot of work since they're already written (this is our second time through the Bible). I just have to type up the notes, maybe make some adjustments, and make sure they have illustrations and colouring pages. It just takes time, that's all.

This fall we're also having a woman's teaching time or discipleship thing or something. I'm not really sure what's happening, only that we're going through the "I am" passages in John and I agreed to do some teaching, but they assure me that I won't be needed until November. I don't plan to think much about that just yet.

There are only a couple weeks of summer left. It's been a nice break and I think I feel ready to start things up again.