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Departments: In the Light Lane As I talked with a fourth grader about his lack of appetite at noon, I asked him what he thought of the school food served for lunch. "Oh, the cafeteria food's OK," he replied. "But it's not as good as the real thing." Deb Morse One day in my ninth grade physical science class, I was discussing how the mass of two objects and distance between them affect the amount of gravitational pull between them. I used the example of pencils and the students' hands. "The pencil and your hand have relatively small masses so the pencil is not attracted to your hand. "But the relationship between the pencil and the earth is different," I continued. "Due to earth's large mass the pencil is drawn to the earth when you drop it." Little did I know this comparison made complete sense to the students. I stepped into the hall for a moment to talk with another instructor, and upon my return into the class several pencils came whirling at me! Apparently, my clever students had been able to figure out the concept of gravitational pull and mass relationship! I asked my students if they were perhaps trying to tell me something about my own mass. Jennifer Sweeney One of my seventh grade students came to me excited with news. "We're going to see an abandoned sink!" she exclaimed. Having taken quite a few direct hits from hurricanes over the past several years, I nodded in approval. "With all these storms we've had," I said, "I've seen a few abandoned sinks myself." The student smiled. "No, no, Mr. Morris," she said. "We've bought tickets to see the band N Sync." Randy Morris Having completed the unit on the Medieval period in world history, I gave my class the following question as part of the test for the unit. "Identify two things a Knight had to do as a member of King Arthur's Round Table." Answered one student: "(1) A Knight had to attend all meetings of the Round Table. "(2) He had to be on time!" Patricia Tarashuk As I was sitting in the back of the classroom listening to the intern teacher talking with our students about faults and earthquakes, I became anxious. We live in Salt Lake City at the base of the Wasatch Mountains, directly on top of the Wasatch Fault. The intern was doing a great job of explaining the concepts, but had yet to make the obvious connection to our local environment. Finally, I could stand it no longer. "Boys and girls, we live right on top of a fault," I said. "Does anyone know the name of that fault?" A student quickly answered: "Asphalt?" Pat Rusk As a seventh grade teacher, I occasionally call a parent about a child's academic progress (or lack thereof). After one phone call, I knew that I had made an impression when the student came up to me the next day full of spunk. "Mr. Lux," she said, "I want your mother's phone number so I can call her and ruin your life, too." I was somewhat taken aback, but this student became one of my more hard-working pupils. Brian Lux After being transferred from a middle school resource center to the central office, some of my former students wrote me letters. One of the seventh graders wrote: "I have some good news and I have some bad news. The good news is that I was put in a harder math book. The bad news is that I can't do it!" From another letter from a seventh grader: "I am trying really hard to be good, but I haven't been able to succeed yet!" Nancy Kurbyweit Recently, I was discussing the topic of Mother's Day with my first and second graders. One of my students eagerly raised his hand to share his ideas about this special holiday. "Mrs. Alverson, I planted an iris for my mommy for Mother's Day. They're pretty. You know I'm iris. Well, only half iris." Cheryl Alverson I bought some CDs to play during work time. They came in a pack of three, and the last one was an opera. I told the class that I didn't care for the opera. The students wanted to listen to the CD anyway, so I played it. One day, after hearing the CD again, I noted that I was beginning to like the opera. One little boy looked at me and said, "That's because you are listening to it with children you love." Priceless! Carla Plager While I was conducting a lesson on how to compute finance charges to my fifth grade Pre-Algebra 1 students, I asked them to write down 2 ways they thought banks made money. After a bit of discussion, one of my brightest students began wildly waving his hand. When called upon, he responded, "By emptying the gumball machines!" Scott Fowler My third graders were refining their use of quotation marks. During a discussion of what was needed on a classroom example to make one child's dialog complete, one boy raised his hand to answer. He could not recall the correct name for the punctuation and as his hand flailed in frustration, he said, "You know! Those flying dots!" Meg Bidwell-Klein One of my second grade students was reading aloud to me and read the word "tradition." "Do you know what tradition is?" I asked. She thought for a moment. "Well, no," she said. "But I know what subtraction is." Kathy Dodge Friday mornings, the special ed teacher and I meet to design a daily math lesson centered around the morning newspaper. Each member of our ninth grade pre-algebra inclusion class has a newspaper. With articles on military budgets and lottery winners, this particular paper provided an excellent opportunity to investigate "large numbers." One day, a student was creating a budget using the fictitious lottery winnings from the newspaper: "I would give millions to my mother and to my church and keep the rest for me." I realized that next week would be a good time to focus on "small numbers." Anthony Wayne Sapp While teaching a math lesson, I asked, "How many right angles does a rectangle have?" My student answered, "Two." "Show me your two right angles," I said. "What do you call the others?" "Those are my left angles." Cheryl Weaver
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