School Days

Well, we're halfway through the third day of school. And I gotta say, I love these kids way more than I expected to. I really don't enjoy middle school aged little people, and this year I have 9th grade AND 8th grade (and 10th grade and 11th grade). I still have bad dreams about 7th grade three years ago. So I was somewhat dreading teaching middle school again. But really, they are awesome. Way more awesome than I thought.

Yesterday, we were going over unit conversions in 9th grade, like converting miles per hour to kilometers per hour. And we got into a discussion about why they have to learn American units of measurement instead of just using metric all the time. The entire class is Asian except for one American who was born and raised in Indonesia. None of them use the American system for weights and measures. I concur that it's pretty stupid when compared with the metric system. But they gotta learn it, so I provided several valid (or so I thought) reasons for learning the American system: they might someday go to college in America, it's good to learn how other people in the world do/measure things, being open-minded is a positive thing, because their textbook and teacher are both American, because I say so, etc.

On their homework assignment, one problem asked them to compare the weight of a bumblebee (given in ounces) to the weight of a whale (given in tons), meaning they would have to convert either the bee's weight to tons or the whale's weight to ounces. The first part of the question just asks them to convert one to the other. The second part asks them to tell how many times heavier the whale is than the bumblebee. And the third part asks them to explain another way they could have worked the problem. Suggested answers are, "convert the whale and bee's weight both to pounds and compare" and "instead of converting the whale's weight to ounces, I could have converted the bee's weight to tons".

One Indonesian student came up with a unique solution.

"By converting the weight to the glorious master race metric system."

My poor grader had no clue what to do with something that in no way resembled what was in the answer key, so he asked me to look at it. I told him not to mark it wrong and laughed kind of a lot.