KidzBlog!
05 January 2006
Ah, sweet mystery of life, et cetera...
Somebody actually complained that I hadn't updated this thing in a while. I was gonna get Maureen Dowd to cover for me while I was on book leave, but I decided instead to just blow it off.
In truth there's not much for me to report. This is the real thankless part of the year for me. I'm trying to establish discipline and get the kids the basics, so later in the year we can do amazing things that I will write about ad nauseum with still photos and video clips and the whole shebang. I did have to physically restrain a kid who was having a tantrum for the first time in my career, but I was a lot bigger than him so there's not much to tell.
But here: just to tide you over, may I offer one of my favorite teaching stories from yesteryear. Actually, from the year before yesteryear. [It gets a little blue towards the end, so if you're a person who's uncomfortable with that sort of thing, or my grandmother, you should click over to homestarrunner.com or something right now.]
Just the sexy people left? Good. So a coupla years ago I'm teaching a 4th grade class. We're talking the basics of reading music. I start by introducing the musical staff and the treble clef, which look like this:
See how the curly part of the treble clef kind of circles around the second line from the bottom? And doesn't that treble clef look like a fancy letter-G? That treble clef is telling us that the second line is the line for the pitch G. This was the point I was trying to make.
After the kids picked up on the clef-G connection, I took my dry-erase marker and continued the curl to make a circle, then drew two concentrically smaller circles inside the largest one, until I had formed a bullseye that was squarely trained on the second line.
"Now, if you were gonna shoot an arrow at this bullseye, what would you try to hit? Yes, Maleek?"
"The spot in the middle."
"Right! Now if this clef is really just a big "G", what do you think we call think we call the line that goes through the middle of that bullseye? Um, Gabriella?"
"That's the G-Spot!"
Oh. So that's where it is. ¶ 8:20 PM 0 comments
Somebody actually complained that I hadn't updated this thing in a while. I was gonna get Maureen Dowd to cover for me while I was on book leave, but I decided instead to just blow it off.
In truth there's not much for me to report. This is the real thankless part of the year for me. I'm trying to establish discipline and get the kids the basics, so later in the year we can do amazing things that I will write about ad nauseum with still photos and video clips and the whole shebang. I did have to physically restrain a kid who was having a tantrum for the first time in my career, but I was a lot bigger than him so there's not much to tell.
But here: just to tide you over, may I offer one of my favorite teaching stories from yesteryear. Actually, from the year before yesteryear. [It gets a little blue towards the end, so if you're a person who's uncomfortable with that sort of thing, or my grandmother, you should click over to homestarrunner.com or something right now.]
Just the sexy people left? Good. So a coupla years ago I'm teaching a 4th grade class. We're talking the basics of reading music. I start by introducing the musical staff and the treble clef, which look like this:
See how the curly part of the treble clef kind of circles around the second line from the bottom? And doesn't that treble clef look like a fancy letter-G? That treble clef is telling us that the second line is the line for the pitch G. This was the point I was trying to make.
After the kids picked up on the clef-G connection, I took my dry-erase marker and continued the curl to make a circle, then drew two concentrically smaller circles inside the largest one, until I had formed a bullseye that was squarely trained on the second line.
"Now, if you were gonna shoot an arrow at this bullseye, what would you try to hit? Yes, Maleek?"
"The spot in the middle."
"Right! Now if this clef is really just a big "G", what do you think we call think we call the line that goes through the middle of that bullseye? Um, Gabriella?"
"That's the G-Spot!"
Oh. So that's where it is. ¶ 8:20 PM 0 comments
