Fifth Grade College

My teacher faced a bit of a rebellion today. He often assigns homework covering topics that are never discussed in the class. For instance, this week I had homework on lines, line segments, planes, parallel and perpendicular lines, none of which were even mentioned in class. Needless to say, this makes doing homework on these topics difficult and time consuming. Well, today, there was a mutiny. After a lot of grousing, Mr. Telles asked the class how many individuals took more than one hour to complete homework every day this week. All hands save one were raised. The lone missing hand had opted not to do substantial chunks of her homework and hence could complete it on time. Yeesh.

Homorable Mention

I competed in Reflections again this year, in two categories rather than only in photography. My video of the Warter Moment is slow motion movie I took of water drops falling out of the sky and into a clear glass bowl,. I added the slow motion effects, the title and ending screen, the soundtrack, and so on, using Microsoft Movie Maker, which I highly recommend.

This piece got honorable mention in the film category, but the whole family thinks it should have won. The winning entry was a three slide Ken Burns style slideshow of Neil Armstrong's moon landing made out of paper, scotch tape, and aluminum foil. I suppose the judges found the homemade quality of the work to be charming, but I thought it seemed pretty lame.

I also entered two photographs, one was a still image of the moment that a drop of water splashes into a glass cup. The water is dyed with food coloring to make an even cooler effect. This image was actually pulled from my movie. Happily, our video camera lets you extract high quality still images from it. This image did not even win an award at the school, much less the regional level where the work tonight.

My other entry was the sunlight glinting off of a broken haystalk. I took this picture on a trip to a pumpkin patch. It won first place at the school, so I had hoped this might be representative. Alas, it was not to be.I lost out to a photshopped self-portrait.

Still, I did well, and I'll be bsck to do even better next year!

Leopard Cookies

I got a new stuffie not too long ago, a cute leopard that I made at Build a Bear. He had a story recently, which I wrote down.

Once upon a time, leopard found a chocolate chip cookie. Noticing that the color of the cookie and the chips resembled leopard spots, he named it a "Leopard Cookie" and proudly announced his discovery to all the other stuffies. A see turtle, Hanu, scoffed, "Silly leopard. That's a chocolate chip cookie, not a leopard cookie."

But leopard insisted and decided to take his case to court. The two sides in the court case were Leopard and Hanu with judge Eagle presiding. Leopard made his case, pointing out the remarkable similarity of the chips to leopard spots and of the dough making up the cookie to the color of leopards. Hanu continued to point out that the cookie had a perfectly good name already and did not need another. But one of the narrators, a small, blonde fellow, kept nibbling away at the cookie. Before the judge ruled on the case, the cookie was eaten.

When at last it came time for a decision, the judge noticed the glaring lack of evidence--there was no cookie, leopard or otherwise. This was enough to tip the scales of justice. Citing lack of evidence, the case was closed in favor of Hanu. No leopard cookies.

Geometry

Today, we started a unit on the baffling topic of geometry. The source of the bafflement is the insistence on using the same letters to describe various things. For instance, the two points, A and B, can describe a line segment, AB, a line AB, or a ray AB. Worse yet, the ray AB is not to be confused with the ray BA, which is a different thing entirely. On the other hand, the line and line segment AB is the same thing as the line and line segment BA. Yeesh. Math is supposed to be precise. This doesn't seem precise at all. Why don't they use one set of letters to describe one thing.

And don't get me started about planes. While I like paper airplanes, the geometry planes are an entirely different matter.