Sarcasm training

I've been helping out in Veronica's class once a week for the past few weeks, helping with math games. The kids seem to enjoy it, and while I don't love teaching and really wouldn't have the patience to do it full-time, I'm happy to help the teacher and get to know Veronica's classmates and see how she interacts. (Plus, as the youngest, I feel she's had the least amount of my time in school, so I owe her.)

This week, we were doing rudimentary multiplication, rolling a six-sided die to determine which two numbers we would work with. Two girls ended up with 3 and 1, and I said, "Oh, wow, what a tough problem." They both looked at me with completely blank faces, clearly wondering what was wrong with me ... and then the light dawned, and they laughed, and spent the rest of the session trying to decide what the toughest problem in the history of the world was (they settled on 0 + 0). I've had teachers remark to me that they like having my kids in class because they "get" sarcasm ... hopefully I've helped these two young ladies along that road as well!

Things Found in Books

I've been reading Moby Dick, a copy that previously belonged to my grandparents, and in it I found an article from the Cleveland Plain Dealer from the early 1960s on polar bears, and why they are the "nastiest" creatures in the zoo. For the life of me, I can't imagine why anyone in my family would have cut it out (from two different pages), much less tucked it safely away in a book.

Topics

I started this blog without any too clear a picture of what I intended to use it for, thus demonstrating the truth of the old adage, never start a blog on a whim. (If it's not an adage, it ought to be!) And now I find that topics come to me when I'm nowhere near the computer, but when I sit down to write a blog post, topics are nowhere to be found. Perhaps what I need to do is carry around a notebook for blog ideas. I swore I would not degenerate into complaints about the weather, the way my last blog did, so clearly I need to find a way to generate ideas without having to look out the window for them!