Life imitates Art.

About 20 years ago I experienced an episode of M*A*S*H.  You know the episode where Hawkeye and Trapper are looking for an incubator?  They run into a control freak Supply Sargent with 3 incubators in storage who, when they ask him for one, responds “but if I give you one, I’ll only have two.”

We were just getting computers in our classrooms and I had gone to the front office looking for a surge protected power strip.  The secretary found one in the supply room and when I asked if I could have it she told me “but then I wouldn’t have one.”

Last week I lived another sitcom episode.  The Seinfeld episode where George eats an éclair out of the trash.

It wasn’t an éclair, but when a student threw away his box from KFC and another student grabbed the biscuit out of it, I just had to laugh.

Blurred Vision

I’ll admit it – I blurred these perfectly sharp pictures just for this theme.  That’s because as soon as I saw the theme I thought “Cool, now I can use some of my school pictures.”  In case you didn’t know, I can get in trouble if I post pictures of students on my blog, especially if the students are in focus and easily identifiable.

So I waded through my school pictures and chose one from each of the schools I taught at, ones with (hopefully) good stories that go with them.

School #1:  In 2001 our school did a service project where we brought a bunch of students up to Midway to help clear part of the track for one of the 2002 Olympic venues.  Here are a few students sitting on the hill relaxing after a day of clearing.

Back then it was common for both boys and girls to bleach their hair, and this picture reminded me of one student who did it himself.  He came to school with his previously brown hair bleached a very white blond.  One spot on the top, back of his head was particularly white, and the hair just fell out onto my finger when I poked at it.  I asked him what he did to bleach is hair.

“I poured a bunch of bleach in a bowl, stuck my head in and held it there.  I figured it was done when it started burning.”

Uh, more than done.  He ended up having to shave his head completely.  At least it grew back.

School #2: This kid got paid $5 to lick my chalkboard when I called him up to do a problem.  The smearing of chalk all over his face was free.  **This student also drank a 3 month old carton of milk for $7, and was confused why he was feeling nauseous by lunch.

School #3: One of the classes I enjoyed the most was this after-school cooking class at an inner-city middle school.  It was always packed and the kids loved it, and surprisingly they liked cooking “real food” more than desserts.  Several of them proudly told me how they had made our home made chicken noodle soup for their families.

School #4: Another class I really enjoyed teaching was my Psychology classes at the high school.  One of our counselors got her father to bring in his lie-detector machine and we had fun hooking up students to it and asking them (benign) questions.

School #5: A student brought in some Kool-Aid that he had forgotten to put the sugar in.  We spent some time seeing who would dare to try the unsweetened Kool-Aid, and getting pictures of their reactions.

School #6: And finally, a crowd surrounds students competing in a pie eating contest during lunch.

Pelicorn.

Imaginary equine meets odd looking bird.  Romance ensues and even odder offspring are the result.  Only in the mind of a junior high school kid does this make sense.  And only in the mind of this kid would it make sense to ask me to put it up in the background of the morning announcements for all to see.

So what does that say about me, since I did put it up?  And now I’m putting it on here, for all to see: The Pelicorn.

And on Valentine’s day, all I got was one rose with this note attached:

And all my English teacher friends should be happy to see that this person correctly wrote “you are” as “you’re”, not “your”. 

It’s been quite a week.

Labor Day Fun

I took Old Blue out for his weekly drive and as I was driving through Sugarhouse Park it caught the eye of a kid about 8 or 9 years old.

As I came up next to him, he started running on the grass along the side of the road yelling “I want a car like that, I want a car like that,…”  Since I was in the park I was going pretty slow, he managed to stay up with me for about 6 car lengths.  Yelling all the way.

Before that, I was taking some pictures with the infrared camera, and had to break out the good camera and telephoto lens to get some pictures of this.

Parents, stuffing their kids into big bubble-balls and then pushing them down the hill. 

What is this world coming to, and why didn’t anyone think of this when I was a kid?

Anyone else think that looks a lot like what NASA used when they dropped the first Mars rovers on the planet?

Picture courtesy of NASA

And some say funding for space exploration has no practical applications.