S-P-E-L-L-I-N-G

I've talked about math before, and also writing, but I haven’t yet brought up a subject that’s pretty much dropped after fifth grade: spelling. Sure, spelling counts in essays, but there are no more spelling stations with sand and colored gel, coming up with sentences with spelling words, or weekly spelling tests. Instead, there’s spell chekc.

I’m not a horrible speller, but I’m not a fantastic speller either. Though if you can sound it out, I can spell it. (Just so you know, coliseum cannot be sounded out. It was the word I got wrong in the fifth grade spelling bee, which, to be honest, I probably entered to get the medal for participation. I still can’t spell coliseum.)

I’m also not that lazy, but in fifth grade, when some of us who were doing well on the regular spelling tests got to pick our own words from a list of spelling bee practice words, I didn't waste the opportunity. Some people went through the packet and picked the shortest words they could find, but I went a different route. Since one of our weekly spelling assignments was to alphabetize our spelling list, I went through the packet and picked one word from each letter until I had enough words. I may have even gone so far as to pick words from similar categories so that when we made sentences with our words, I could jam five or six words into each sentence. At one point, my teacher asked me to stop doing that . . . so I only put four words in each sentence.

Spelling would then disappear from the language arts (LA) and reading curriculum until my eighth grade year. My LA/reading teacher had several interesting practices, including team dictionary races to find vocabulary words and a weekly spelling pretest.

My other spelling story doesn't have to do with the spelling tests, but with the rule that all essays first term had to be handwritten. This rule gave me all the opportunities I needed to disregard my least favorite spelling rule. I do just want to say, though, that I don’t think it can be called a rule anymore when it goes like this:

I before E except after C or when sounding like A, as in neighbor and weigh; or in weird, because weird’s a weird word; or in f words like foreign, forfeit, and freight; or in the number eight; or in science when you need to spell seismic, reindeer, or protein; or . . .

Kayaking

Because it’s summer, we’re experiencing a heat wave, and my brain has been fried on the sidewalk my creative juices are really flowing right now, the title of this post is “Kayaking.” It is about kayaking. I know, you’re wondering how I came up with that brilliant title.

Anyway, a few summers ago my father invested in a pair of kayaks so that he and I could go kayaking without having to bother about rental fees and things like that. Instead, we now bother about getting the kayaks from under the deck to the top of the van, which involves setting up the carriers on the roof rack, hauling the kayaks up to the carriers, strapping the boats down, and loading paddles, seat covers, life jackets, water, and snacks into the van. By the time you’re done, you’re tired enough to forgo the whole venture, but you've gone through all the trouble, so you set out anyway, and hope that the weird humming sound you hear isn't the kayak getting ready to make its escape and/or cause permanent damage to your car roof.

If it’s the first kayaking adventure of the summer, you have the added pleasure of first chasing out any winter residents such as dirt, spider webs, and insects in various stages of decay. You have to use the strongest setting on the hose and sometimes, if you’re really fortunate, you get splattered with dead insect parts and mud. I know this because I've done it twice.

So in the past few weeks, we've been heading out to nearby kayaking locations. There are a couple state parks with lakes near our house, but one is pretty small and the other tends to have a bunch of motorboats on it. There’s also a (somewhat) well-known river that we went to most recently. But I didn't bring my camera so I only have pictures from our trip the week before that.

There are some parts of the lake that are pretty quiet, and there must not have been much wind in general, so the reflections turned out really clear.

And here’s a picture of my feet in the kayak. With my new sandals.

Platonic Friends

The most useless math class I have ever taken was my seventh grade pre-algebra class. We’d usually show up to class and begin with about five minutes of taking notes. Extra difficult topics, such as multistep single variable algebraic manipulations like 2x+3=7 – you have to subtract three from both sides, and then also divide by two – may have taken ten minutes. After copying down the notes, we’d do half a dozen practice problems that all required the same steps to get the answer.

Then we’d get riddle worksheets. If you've never seen these, you've missed out. Basically, the answer to each problem corresponds to a letter. When you get all the letters, you put them in a certain order and spell out the answer to a riddle given at the top of the page. The riddles were almost universally terrible. Awful humor aside, the other problem with these worksheets was that since so many letters were needed, and each letter corresponded to a problem, each problem required the computational power of a broken abacus.

Compare this to college, where upon seeing that your math homework for the week is a single problem, you should get very, very suspicious. When you go look up the problem in the book, you find that it has twenty-seven parts that all build on each other, meaning that when you get the first part off by a few hundredths, by the time you finish you've concluded that after the soccer ball was kicked, it reached a maximum velocity of 2,793 miles per hour. Right . . .

So you go back to part one, where you read: A rocket is launched at an angle 37° to the vertical. It reaches escape velocity 3.492 minutes after liftoff. For the first 57 seconds, it has a variable acceleration of 17x+89.43, where x is the distance above the ground of the center of mass of the rocket in inches. The rocket is 1 meter long with an initial payload of 20 pounds. Each second, 0.748 pounds of fuel burns off. Assume the rocket is a cylinder with the fuel uniformly distributed in a smaller cylinder inside the rocket. . . . (Three pages later) Find the escape velocity of the rocket and what color it is.

Compare both of these to my tenth grade geometry class, which was neither as useless as pre-algebra nor as ridiculous as multivariable calculus, but still had a few quirks of its own. Foremost among those was my geometry teacher’s use of the overhead projector. By that, I don’t mean that she taught using PowerPoint slides from a projector mounted on the ceiling. She had one of those, but she preferred to use a 1950s projector with one of those super hot bulbs and an arm that had to be adjusted to focus the image. She would then project her transparencies (circa 1980) straight onto the board, which would then make a bright spot that would a) blind you and b) make it impossible to copy the notes from that spot.

All of this is to lead into my favorite geometry lesson. It has nothing to do with riddles, confusing homework, or even the overhead projector. It has everything to do with the five Platonic solids. Which, in case you were wondering, are the tetrahedron, hexahedron, octahedron, dodecahedron, and icosahedron.  (Platonic solids are polyhedrons with faces that are congruent convex polygons; the same number of faces have to meet at each vertex.)  As it happens, we have just enough of those magnetic bars and balls to make all five Platonic solids, with the dodecahedron stellated for structural reasons.

Clockwise from the large one: stellated dodecahedron, cube, tetrahedron,
octahedron, icosahedron

My personal favorite Platonic solid is the icosahedron. What makes my particular model even better is that

it glows in the dark.

Dear Mozart,

I know a lot of people think you were a genius – don’t get me wrong; I think you’re a genius too, at least when it comes to music – but I've spent a lot of time playing your clarinet concerto (in A major, K. 622), and Hezekiah and I had a few comments to make. In case you were wondering, Hezekiah’s my clarinet. Did you ever name any of your instruments? Zorobabel might have been a nice name for a piano. Or maybe Jechonias?

Anyway, I just wanted to ask if you needed to put quite so many notes into your clarinet concerto, especially in some parts of the first movement. It really does sound nice, but some of those long sixteenth note runs start making my fingers get all tangled up with each other. At least some of them are slurred, but people lost your original copy of the concerto with all your markings about articulation and dynamics, so the publishers today have to guess at how you meant it to be. I hope you didn't mean for everything to be tongued, because then I’d have been playing it wrong and it would be even harder than it is already.

And then in the second movement, I don’t think there are too many notes there, but it’s all slow and legato, which is difficult for Hezekiah. If you ever heard me and Hezekiah playing your clarinet concerto, I just wanted to make sure that you knew we weren't trying to insult your piece by playing it badly. It’s just that Hezekiah wasn't made for the most advanced music. He’s enjoying the pep band now, though. Maybe you could come and see us sometime?

Lastly, the third movement is my favorite of the concerto, but there’s one particularly annoying part. First off, there are some tricky sixteenth note arpeggios. Second, these arpeggios end really high. When I say high, I mean high enough that people might need to start checking their eardrums for bleeding. Finally, between each set of arpeggios is a sixteenth note rest. I don’t know if you've ever played a woodwind or brass instrument, but sixteenth note rests present an interesting dilemma for those instruments. At the speed of the third movement, a sixteenth note is too short to take a proper breath, but too long to stop the air and wait. You sometimes end up taking a half breath then having to rush to play again and in the process half choking. Just something for you to think about.

Well, I hope I haven’t detained you from your composing too long. I really do like your clarinet concerto, and thought we could have a little discussion about it, musician to composer. Happy composing!

Road Tripping: Staycation

This spring, I was gifted with an all expenses paid, summer-long trip, complete with transportation, to . . . my house. So I left the frozen, windy reaches of Ithaca for the thunderstorm ridden region of New England. Who needs a Caribbean cruise?

Especially when our state of the art fitness facility, also known as The Outdoors, offers literally hundreds of miles of roads and trails for running and biking. If you've ever been bored staring at the same three paint chips in the wall by your treadmill, look for The Outdoors in your neighborhood today.

In addition, our wildlife refuge offers thousands of free ranging animals, many of which are just a stone’s throw away in My Backyard. You may get to view and interact with such creatures as ants, moths, grasshoppers, caterpillars, spiders, unidentified beetles, and even mosquitoes. For interested botanists, there are also at least three species of trees, several overgrown bushes, and half a dozen different species of crabgrass. How’s that for biodiversity?

When you get tired of all the outdoors offers, come inside to our five star restaurant, The Kitchen. Studies have shown that up to forty percent of food bought in America gets thrown away. Help us avoid unnecessary waste by joining us for our lunch buffet featuring dishes like last night’s chicken, leftover beef stew, and the everlasting pot of scary curry. Act fast before someone else gets the last slightly expired cracker.

After you eat, feel free to explore our working 21st century house. You may see some of our reenactors doing laundry, watching TV, or even working on the computer. We hope you enjoy your visit!

Coming soon – The grass reseeding pit archeological dig site: Penetrate the upper herbaceous layers to reveal pristine dirt for you to discover hidden treasures. You may even dig up your own pet rock (©1970sFads) to take home with you.