1. When you do numbers in math, and say 1 + 1 equals 2, is the 2 actually 2 units of precisely the same size, or does the quantity within the numbers augment as you go? When you count, are the units in 3 all equal, or is it trickier than that?
2. why did the dinosaurs die? And are we sure they all did?
3. why do they ask questions about apples and oranges being in the same barrel in my arithmetic book? Everybody knows oranges spoil really fast, but apples will last for a long time if you keep them cool, and everybody knows if you put rotten fruit up against good fruit, the good fruit is apt to start rotting sooner. So the answer to how many apples and how many oranges in the barrel is “No oranges if you don’t sell them real fast, and a lot fewer apples than you would have had if you’d stored them properly in their own barrel.”
4. where do shooting stars come from?
5. what makes lightning bugs glow?
6. how does grandma’s crank phone work?
7. why can pigs eat dirt and not get sick?
8. why do rainbows move when you chase them?
9. why does it rain?
10. where did all the water in the oceans come from?
Oddly enough, some are still real good questions.
Lol—I grew up in the age of corporal punishment: you measured what you were about to receive against the joy of doing what you did, and that was that. My parents never hit me in anger, understand. It was Po-li-cy. It was measured. It was just. Believe me, 😆 it was just. And I will say, getting corporal punishment was better than the modern routine of grounding and parental scowling and a week of angst and misery. I’d get mine, get the short lecture and an hour sitting on the porch thinking about it all, and then I was welcome back in the living room living life as normal and nobody would mention it again. No weeklong psychological warfare for my generation.
Last time I took a whack for any misdeed was as a senior in high school, but that was marching band, and discipline there was different than the rest of school. That was the sort of organization that, well, when we once had a fool trying to force a car through a firedrill crowd, and we were in formation getting a little practice in, our director snapped out, “Stand your ground,” and we snapped to and stopped that car. (We were also the band that a Marine Corps judge once asked our director to lighten up on…) But, y’know, I am what I am, and I’m happy with what I am—and the knowledge I’ve stopped a ton of metal driven by a total smart-ass has just occasionally come in handy when dealing with this biz.
LOL Ohh, mom was a graduate of Catholic school system and used to go through a LOT of wooden spoons. So yer butt hurt, you sat tenderly for a day or two and didn’t do it again. We survived just fine!
We were sneaky little wretches though, if one knew it was coming and maybe it wasn’t quite fair, one could take the ‘spoon d’jour’ (usually the one with the longest handle) and rapped it against the counter just right. At the first whack, the spoon would come flying apart and mom would crack up laughing so hard we would get let off. HOWEVAH, if it WAS deserved, there were 4 or 5 other spoons in line so if the first one cracked, mom was still armed and madder than ever. Needless to say, if the spoon came flying apart it usually really was just pure chance. Right up there with picking your switch, I imagine. Get a good one the first time and get it over with. I’m still glad we didn’t have much in the way of ‘switchable’ landscaping.
No books for a week though… that was the ultimate TORTURE! We’re very definitely a reading family. Even now we all manage to get together every few years and stake out a few square feet on Mom n Dad’s floor for a week or so. Nowadays the sibs and I have air mattresses, but the short people (kids) can actually try camping on the floor if they feel up to it. Breakfast and lunch are usually everyone with a cup of coffee, a food item of some sort, and a book as we all crowd around the table. House rules though say no books at dinner!
We had a razor strop with ‘smiley bear’ on one side and ‘growly bear’ on the other. Whenever my dad applied punishment for misdeeds, he made us go get ‘growly bear’ (no breaking that thing) and bend over. My mom of course just grabbed it herself and chased us around whopping on us. Both approaches hurt—a lot although my dad’s application was very controlled.
One day though, when I was older (my mom’s beatings weren’t fair nor called for as she was usually just acting out her rage at her life I think), she got me cornered in the bathroom and I managed to grab the strop away from her. She started kicking and hitting me with her pointy little feet and fists instead, which really hurt a LOT. So I handed it back to her and said, “Here! This doesn’t hurt as much!” Needless to say, she went ballistic and really whomped on me for a while longer, but it was worth it! *lol*
My siblings thought I was nuts for standing up to her like that, but there just came a point for me where enough was enough. I got to where I’d just run to the bedroom or bathroom and hold the door against her if she went into one of those rages. More than once I had to sneak out the bedroom window to get to my baby sitting job, but if she sat down in her chair by the heater, we knew we were safe as long as we stayed out of arm’s reach. Chronic depression is pretty disabling and when she lost her anger rush, she would be immobilized for a while. And then things would go back to ‘normal’ afterwards, even if I had defied her.
And I’m about the only person in my family who really liked to read. I did a lot of it growing up, as you could imagine, but I never was very disobedient at school. I guess compared to home, the teachers seemed ever so reasonable in their requests, and my dad did value us getting good grades, so there was some motivation for me to do well—which meant doing assignments as told and so on.
It would have been nice to have a family who could sit around and read together. Mostly, reacting in response to my mom’s rage probably, we were always fighting and name calling each other, using any and all tactics to hurt each other (excluding lethal methods fortunately). Nowadays, we’ve mostly manage to mend our relationships, but since I’m definitely the oddball aunt, things can still get a bit rocky in their relationship with me.
And from my ‘wacko’ perspective, I can see that our spirit origins have a LOT to do with that. They all came from a herd of unicorns I unknowingly help get captured and killed. So they have that group/herd ‘instinct’ which helps guide their actions in similar ways even as a school of fish can instinctively turn together. I have NONE of that, and it always was a huge mystery to me why they all seemed to know what to do for each other, while I completely in the dark. It also annoyed them and they often considered me a cold and uncompassionate person because I didn’t have that instinct. Let me tell you, from my experience, unicorns may be beautiful and powerful, but they can also be pretty self righteous! 🙂
So why did I reincarnate with this ‘family’? I’ve been trying to make amends to them for my unwitting part in their demise. I had no idea the people (those greedy 1% types were around then too) were going to kill them. They told me that they wanted to capture the unicorns to ‘use their magic’. I had no idea, until it started happening, that what they meant was KILL the unicorns and store their blood so they could drink it to enhance their own powers. I tried to stop them when they went after the baby unicorn (if you think puppies and kitties are cute, you’d almost die from the cuteness of a baby unicorn), but I was so weakened from helping them capture the unicorns I couldn’t defend myself. So they tortured, raped, abused and then killed me too, and threw me by the pile of drained unicorn bodies.
My first actual memory of all this was I could see that I was lying on my side, numb by that time, looking across a field at a roaring fire with people dancing raucously around it. Then I noticed a puddle of my blood in front of me, which had a dribble of the silver unicorn blood swirling and slowly mixing into it. I remember thinking, “Oh crap, that can’t be good!” And then the memory ends, which means I died.
Ever since then, I’ve been reincarnating with this same group off and on, in an effort to make amends for my part in that horrible experience. Of course, since I couldn’t remember past lives, mostly I just endured a life of ill-fitting unhappiness, failing completely in my efforts to apologize. This life though, Yay! I finally remembered and have apologized, although all but one think I’m off in loopy land. It doesn’t matter though. I only need to apologize—I don’t need their forgiveness, so from here on out, I don’t have to reincarnate with them any more! Of course, with the coming full enlightenment, we won’t have to die, if we can make it, so the point may be moot.
I had a seventh-grade teacher who had assigned book reports throughout the year. Well, that was the year I “discovered” the Hardy Boys series, and was voraciously reading them up as fast as I could borrow them from my friend Paul. So, I didn’t turn in a book report – the Hardy Boys books weren’t considered book report material by the teacher – so, my book reports were rejected, or I didn’t turn one in, or whatever. The upshot was that the teacher flat-out told me that I could not use the school library again for the rest of the year, and she told Paul that he couldn’t lend me any more books. This was in front of the entire class, and another way I was mortally embarrassed by a teacher. So, without having access to the school library, I don’t know how she expected me to get books that she considered to be book-report material. I lived 4 blocks from the public library, so I could walk up there and get the books I wanted/needed. I just don’t understand why she thought that was a fitting punishment.
Bright spot in my career—I had a 9th grade English teacher who, after I recited what books I had already read, and after hearing my pitch (with references to Columbus and the Wright Brothers) about WHY I should do a report on this book, with a scientific explanation—let me do a report on a science fiction book by Willy Ley, whose credentials she found acceptable. First science fiction book ever allowed as a book report (illustrated, by me) in the Lawton OK public schools. 😉 Can’t remember her name. Wish I could. But she was one of the good ones. I’d already lucked out in Ms. Lottie Raines, who insisted we learn to read aloud: so we read classic stories ’round the class,’ ie, whenever she rapped the desk with her pointer, the reader stopped cold and sat down and the next in the row stood up and took up reading, with expression and passion, thank you. Did wonders for my confidence in public speaking, and for my spoken vocabulary. And my 7th grade English teacher was keen on diagramming sentences: she had us do 10-20 a night, and she’d put real bears up on the board and tell us whoever solved THAT one first would get points. So she would have people running into her room between classes to deliver their best hope. I’ll tell you the competition was right up there with varsity sports, especially if two or more people were trying to get to her desk to deliver their guess.
I had to write a book report in HS. (NB: I turned 17 two weeks before graduation–younger than all but a handful in the class.) The book was “Ride the White Tiger”, about a Korean boy during the Korean “Police Action”. 😉 I got hold of a thread and wrote a perfect book report, and knew it. It came back with a note “Did you copy this?” (“How? I had to write it in class!) and a grade the teacher thought was representative of the level of work I would do. I was cheated by “expectations”.
Kids know their just desserts, and cheating them is just as bad, if not worse, that cheating anybody else!
Wow, paul. That sounds like a teacher at my community college—I aced one of her tests which she, on the first day of class, had declared to be impossible. Nobody aced her tests, “…so don’t feel bad if you don’t get your usual A+!”
Since I did ace one, as I was walking out of class, I was exclaiming to another student about the fact. She overheard me and angrily snipped, “Yes, I can’t believe it either, but I went over it 3 times just to make sure!”
Well, come final exam (as a research paper) time, I did my usual level of researching and such which I’m pretty good at with 9 different reference sources and right at the 15 pages required and what do you know… I got a D+ on it. Coincidentally the lowest grade she could give me without pulling my final class score down below A.
Someone else wrote their paper on the exact same subject and got an A, although they had only 7 1/2 pages and 2 sources, one of which was a children’s book. So obviously, this is how Mrs. Forrester got even for me acing one of her precious tests. Pretty sad really that someone in such a influential position would stoop so low!
I did go to the Dean and report her, but I really didn’t care if she changed it since I had my A (as I’m sure she figured would be the case). Mostly I just wanted him to know what she was up to. I have no idea if he ever took action on it.
Anyway, talk about punishing someone for the WRONG reason! Just like your teacher… what did she think, you’d stuffed it under your shirt and pulled it out when she wasn’t looking???
That sucks pondwater.
OTOH, when I was teaching, I would definitely respond if someone challenged a grade of that sort by asking for another assignment. And if I found I was wrong, I would get into old history correcting that mark.
Is there any reason for a teacher, instructor, professor to allow personal feelings to dictate grades? I experienced something similar while doing my final exam in practical factors for my “C” school in the Navy. The tester threw me a curve ball by presenting something that wasn’t taught during the school, and laughed about it, because I couldn’t tell him “EXACTLY” what the problem was, I could only tell him that a particular piece of equipment in the circuit was faulty. “Oh, that’s my ace-buster.”, like he was proud that he knew something I didn’t. I knew something he probably didn’t know, either – that he was a jerk.
You might find this interesting:
A giant infographic of the history of scifi. I found you easily because they stuck you near Battlefield Earth. Uck. I’m cool with the other neighbors though.
http://www.fanboy.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/vztJH.jpeg
Well, at least I’m not in the same ‘stream’ as B.E. 😉