jumpingfish

1. Kitty’s Retest

Kitty stayed after school. She had not done well on Tuesday’s test, and she was taking it again for extra points. When she was finished, she closed her laptop and stood up. We made eye contact.

“Can I see how I did?” she asked.

These tests get automatically graded. So I opened my laptop and scrolled down to her name.

“You got a 100.”

She was relieved.

“I guess I should have done the review before I took it the first time.”

Yes, there is that.

2. Peter’s Insight

Peter stayed after school so that he could work on today’s worksheet while I was in the room. He picks things up quickly, and he only had a few questions. When he was finished, he turned his work into the purple box. Then he turned to me and asked about retaking the test, as Kitty just had done.

“What days are you here after school?” he asked.

“Every day,” I said.

“Every day. I see.” He paused for a moment and then asked (in a sympathetic tone), “Mr. Hasan, do you get to have a life outside teaching?”

The fair and industrious Trudy wants to know if I tell them my wife wonders likewise.

3. Erica’s Question

Once a week I pull my better students into my room for 30 minutes of “enrichment.” We’ve done this a few times, and although I started out with great hopes, their reactions have been underwhelming. I should have expected this, of course, since there are no grades associated with this time, and so most of the kids couldn’t care less.

On this day, the kids were rotating squares to investigate rotational symmetries, although I did not say that. I asked questions. They answered. I drew pictures on the board. Some of them dutifully drew the pictures on the papers that they were manipulating. And by the end of class we had a Cayley table for the C4 cyclic group, although I definitely did not tell them that.

We finished about 10 minutes early, and they instantly buried their noses in their phones. Then from the back of the room Erica asked a question.

“Mr. Hasan, what do you call that, what we just did?”

I smiled. 

“Group theory,” I said. 

Next week: Dihedral groups.

4. Jenny’s Eyes

Jenny finished the worksheet we were working on in class. But she had one remaining question. I walked over to where she and Jasmin had been working together, and we talked about her question.

Jenny just recently dyed her hair a reddish-maroon color. More red than maroon, but somewhere in-between, and fairly striking. She also had a strikingly bloodshot left eye. I kneeled down next to her.

“Jenny. Your red hair matches your eyes. What happened?”

“Mister,” she said. “It was from the glue for my eyelashes.”

“The glue!? Does it hurt?”

“Both eyes, Mister. It hurts.”

And then so did mine.

5. Annie’s Artwork

Annie is an artist. She’s quite good. She sketched a picture of me the other day. Evidently this is what Annie’s math teacher looks like by sixth period.

Do I look tired? Ask a teacher. 

#silentsunday

That morning, a fierce wind howled. We could hear its moaning thru the walls of the house. 

Shrub and tree branches whipped dramatically left and right and up and down. A large limb lay on the ground at the base of the Walnut tree. The garbage cans fell over. The sticks and trimmings in the yard waste can were gone, evidently having been blown down the street and maybe piled up in the corner of someone’s yard.

The car shook as I commuted east in the pre-dawn light.

The rising sun struggled to shine.

Let’s talk about “sawbucks” again. Steely-eyed mjb observed that they seem to be the same as “sawhorses”. I mean there are sawhorses and there are sawbucks.

Go look. I’ll wait.

Same thing, right? But no. Check out this  article about building a sawbuck out of logs, and take a moment to look at that the guy’s sawbuck.

Not a sawhorse.

I’m reminded (no surprise perhaps) of linear algebra. It was all about matrices. We added, subtracted, and inverted them. We diagonalized and decomposed them. We did all this, and then we were done … until I find out later, in the twilight of my years, that a matrix is just a particular way to calculate a linear transformation. The matrices are mere representations. The important concepts are the transformations. I missed the memo!

So don’t wait until your twilight years! Read the memo. Know your concepts. A sawhorse is a sawhorse, and a sawbuck is something else. 

I’m not waiting any longer. There’s an hour to go before the Central Time ball drops. But my laptop is down to 20%, the fair and industrious Trudy has long given up the ghost, Miss Izzy is catatonic under my AHIHA hockey jersey, the Zyrtec is having its side-effect, and so let’s do this. One last fish for 2023.

The Red Oaks know their time. Their burgundy leaves turn brown and fall to the ground.

In the brisk wind last week, I raked leaves into ever-metamorphosing piles, gathered them up, took them into the back yard, mulched them with the mower, and dumped them onto this year’s new compost pile. A day later, the center of the pile was hot in spite of it being baby-it’s-cold outside (in a Central Texas kind of way).

Today is far from cold. The sun is shining, and the sky is blue. It’s too warm for a sweater. A good day for a swim.

In the sun, wasps and bees and manifold flittering insectoids are happy with the wildflower blossoms that persist even with the fallen leaves all around. The wildflowers don’t seem to particularly care about time, hanging on as long as the pollinators hang around.

Happy New Year.