i am not a math reject!

Ho ho ho ho! Remember the math query about Joe and his pens and pencils? (Joe's got 30 pens and pencils. If he'll get 2 pencils for each pen he gives away, how many pens will he have to give away to get a total of 48 pencils all together?). Well, I had been thinking that I was a dummy for not being able to figure out the answer right away. But when Phet got home the other night, I asked him to figure out the equation for the problem and - get this - it took him half an hour to do it! It ended up being about 7 lines of problem solving, complete with all kinds of 2ab - c kind of stuff. Phet wondered whether this wasn't just a tad difficult for grade 5s, but we thought maybe it was just the Singaporean system that had them all whizzed up. The next day at school I checked the formula with the math teacher and told her we'd had quite a time solving the problem. And she said - double get this - that although the formula was correct, the students were actually supposed to create a trial and error graph to come up with the answer. So (and you know how much I am loathe to say this but) I was right all along. Yes, me. I started out with trial and error and I was correct. Smarty me. I rule. All hail me! [Full of Myself-14-September-2005]

...but i am a teaching reject

The one piece of grammar vocabulary that I taught my son was wrong, all wrong. For ages Ji and I have been having a jaunty time singing "Homonym! Homonym!" whenever we heard, read, or said words like 'dear' and 'deer'. But damn it all I have have muddled his brain - and not on purpose, this time. I played a game with my kids in class the other day in which I introduced them to the idea of (supposed) homonyms and then had them compete to answer a series of riddles to think of (supposed) homonyms. The hit riddle was "one is something green that you might like to eat and the other is something yellow that you would never want to drink". The answer was 'pea' and 'pee'. Heh heh. But then I looked at the textbook again later that night and realized that I had things ass-backwards.

For your elucidification, it is actually homoPHONES that sound the same. Duh. Like if you heard them on the phone you couldn't tell them apart. HomoGRAPHS are words that look the same but are said differently, like 'the paper will tear, but don't shed a tear.' And homoNYMS sound the same, look the same, but mean different things. Like, 'I'm stuck in a traffic jam, but I won't starve because I've got my jar of jam beside me.' I'm hoping that Ji will forget which specific examples I told him were homonyms, and that since he can't read - let alone spell yet - that he'll forget my outrageous grammatical error. Or do you think I've scarred him for life?

Also falling the in reject category this week: my inability to remember the names of two of my students in my Grade 4 class. I was really disappointed with myself when, after over a week of classes, I still had to look at the nametags to tell two students apart. At first there was a little cluster of three girls, all with names starting with 'P', who I couldn't differentiate. Then I realized that Por was taller than her friends Praew and Prim, she had a different hairstyle, and didn't giggle so much. But I was still having a helluva bad time keeping Praew and Prim straight. I didn't admit it to anyone, but I was begining to wonder whether I was a creepy white person who couldn't tell non-white folks apart. I'd always done really well with students' names in the past, even in classes of over 40 kids in Hanoi. I'd sketch little pictures of each student and embed their features into my memory. But here, with a class of 10, I couldn't get it right. I started the ever-so-noticeable teachers' flub of calling everyone else nicely by name and omitting their names. "Nice spelling, Gun! Great work, Win! Super job, Alice! Well done...uh...girls!" I was also sort of afraid to stare at the girls too closely in case they cottoned on that I was an idiot who couldn't sort friends apart from each other. I tried to surreptitiously make note of their hairdos and profiles, but just when I thought I'd gotten it worked out in class, I had to talk to them outside at recess and I drew blanks again. It was killing me.

Yesterday I was tidying my things out of the Grade 4 room and I noticed that there were some nice posters up with pictures of the students on them, with notes from each student about their family, likes and dislikes, and so on. I started reading Praew's, hoping to study her photo more closely, and what I read was this:

"My name is Praew. I live with my mother and my sister. My mother always gets mad at my sister and hits her instead of me. My sister Prim and I are twins."

TWINS.

So, like, I'm at least quadruply stupid for not having noticed that. [Bangkok-14-September-2005]