Law of Gravity

It's time for a dive back into the way-back files. This post originally appeared December 8, 2009 .  12th grade AP English. They were working on some essay or other (I didn't have a lot of details, but they were AP kids and could be trusted to do their work without me having to prompt them). They were half working, half talking about random stuff. One student started talking about coffee. He asked what people put in it. One of the girls mentioned cream and sugar. The boy said that no, that's what kids put in it. Adults put old in it. That's not a typo. He said "old". He continued with this reasoning. He said that coffee makes kids old. One girl complained that she drank coffee, but she wasn't old. The boy said that she might be 17, but the coffee made her older. So, I asked what about older adults who did not drink coffee. He said that they just age normally, not extra aged because of the old in coffee. It made only a smidgen of sense. Of course that was t...

It's been a while since I was at the continuation high school. Not much there has changed. Graduation is fast approaching. To qualify for the graduation activities, including the graduation ceremony, the students have to have all of their credits posted by sometime this week. (The events of this post happened last week.) Sixth period. History. The conversation started with grad night. One girl had gotten her ticket for the festivities. (I'm not sure where they're going this year.) The other two girls in her group were discussing whether they needed to go to school that day. Somehow, this segued into how many credits they had. To graduate, they must have 220. One was 20 short. One was 14 short. And the third girl whispered to the others how many more she needed. They spent much of the period discussing how many credits they needed. Then they moved on to astrology (and whether the Aries was compatible with her Capricorn boyfriend--although they weren't certain he was a Ca...

Today's post is NSFW. Apologies. I try to keep things PG around here, but I really want to tell you about this...  "That's not what that means." It was a rather weird Monday where I ended up covering four different classes. Fourth period it was a US history class. They were supposed to be perusing a chapter on the Cold War. (It was next door to the class I covered the week before spring break .) But if they were on task, this wouldn't be a very interesting post. One girl explained to another the definition of the term "cockblocker". Or, at least, she thought  it was the definition. It was a rather literal interpretation, involving smacking/slapping a certain part of the male anatomy. That's where I chimed in. I jump into student conversations when misinformation is being perpetuated. "That's what it says on Urban Dictionary . I took a screenshot. Want to see?" she replied. I did not. "Well, then Urban Dictionary is wrong."  I ...

"What does 'prostitution' mean?" It was a seventh grade science class. They were supposed to be working on a vocabulary assignment dealing with erosion and weathering (earth science stuff). And mostly they were. But seventh graders can be easily distracted by random stuff. And even though they weren't supposed to be on their cell phones (I had banned them as they had abused the privilege the day before), clearly something had caught the eye of a group of three boys sitting on the right side of the classroom. I said something about them having an assignment to complete. So, the one boy sitting behind the other two looked down at his lap and quoted, "Violators subject to prosecution..." Oh, so the boy just misread something. Again, not on topic. And we didn't need to go down that particular rabbit hole. I again directed them to get back to work. But you know they didn't. One of the three had to look up on his phone the word "prostitution"...