You are so a knucklehead...no, seriously

Just when I hit the mid-semester slump and start praying for Thanksgiving to hurry up and get here, I walk down the hall and hear a kid insisting his friend is a knucklehead. Gotta love third graders.

I'm sitting here trying to think of something fun and exciting to do for my social studies class today and I've come to the conclusion that the Development of Societies and fun are not compatible. My only hope is that one of my students has an inspirational new take on things. Which isn't too far a stretch--there have been times when the lesson gets away from me and becomes something my students own entirely.

I was teaching number lines to my pre-algebra class one day and as I drew the (somewhat shaky) line on the board, I realized that I couldn't think of the word for what each number on the line was. Upon looking it up later, I realized I should have been calling them units. Instead, I went with notches. This must have been a somewhat foreign word for my ten year olds, as several of them immediately thought I had said nachos. However, although they recognized this as a strange word to show up in math, they did not say anything. Perhaps they assumed (seeing as I was still completely serious) that they just had never heard it before but that it was still accurate. Once the mix-up was discovered, hilarity ensued--but to this day, we still call them nachos instead of units or notches. It makes math a little easier to swallow.

In other student news, one of the seventh grade boys stopped me in the hall the other day and asked what shoe size I wore. You can never predict what you're going to hear on any given day. I need to remember this for the rest of year.