Points for Creativity

Excuse me. I know I'm supposed to be [fill-in-the-blank with any of the 100 items on my To Do list] right now, but this is important.

I'm sitting here, totally focused and in the zone and grading and getting stuff knocked off the aforementioned To Do list, and all of a sudden, I came across something that I had to blog about. Which is how I wound up here.

Today in class, we started talking about subtraction story problems. We did an activity where I passed out an index card, gave students an equation, and had them write out a story problem to go with it.

One of the index cards has this written on it:

"I have 76 bags of fake snot. I use 48 bags of fake snot. How many fake snot bags do I have now?"

.......I'm dead serious.

But wait. It's not over. I continue on to the next index card. This one says:

"Jelly has 92 balloons. She gives Peanut Butter 54. How many does Jelly have left?"

And then our fish made an appearance:

"Brad Rudolph has 92 scales. He loses 54. How many scales does he have now?"

These are pretty good, I think to myself. I start to feel all proud of my kids' creativity. And then, just when I think it can't get any better, they add some emotion:

"I had 76 Lego Harry Potter video games. I finished 48 of them! WHOOOOOO! How many did I still not finish?"

"I had 63 fish and one was named Brad Rudolph and I loved him so much and I gave 35 away but not Brad Rudolph. How many fish do I have now?"

Cuties.

Free Food and Pure Poetry

Sometimes, when I am off-track, I spend the day at a carnival. Not on purpose, really - I always mean to go to UVU to go to classes and study with my friends, but I always wind up with my arms full of cotton candy, popcorn, a free necklace or two, and fliers. So it would appear that I went to a carnival instead of a university, like I meant to. 

And if you know me at all, you'll know that that is just fine with me.
And I'm sorry if this gif gives you a seizure.

Anyway, I might as well just admit that I know it is going to be a carnival before I even pull into visitor parking. I know that I will be offered food, and I know that I will graciously accept. So when I walk in, and the library is to my right, I breeze on past it and wander down the hall in the opposite direction until somebody feeds me.

This works out especially well when my best friend, being a model citizen, wants to eat healthy, but she still takes a bag of popcorn and hands it off to me so I can give it to a certain perpetually hungry boy who is studying in the library. Hashtag, Caitlinisthebestfriendandiamthebestgirlfriendever.

(Sorry for hashtagging but I don't think it's quite as bad if you write out the word hashtag so everyone knows you're being ironic even if secretly you kind of like it but you just know that it's frowned upon because people overdo it so you don't want to be one of those people so you write out the word hashtag so people think you're being ironic even though secretly you kind of like it but you just know that it's frowned upon because people overdo it so you don't want to be one of those people....really sorry)

So anyway, while planning lessons in the library today, I decided that I want to teach my kids about cinquain poems for Valentines Day. Google was surprisingly unhelpful, so I just went ahead and wrote my own cinquains to use as examples. Here is what I came up with:

Cupid

 Sneaky, Romantic

Hiding, aiming, enchanting

A cherub of love

Matchmaker.

 Cassidy Jane

Silver, Adorable

Revving, singing, racing

My cute little automobile

Carbaby.

Brad Rudolph

Flashy, Squiggly

Darting, swishing, bubble-blowing

A fish like no other

Betta King.

Stephen

Intelligent, Hungry

Chomping, disrupting, kissing

Getting A's on all his tests

Boyfriend spaz.

In other news, Stephen loved the free popcorn I gave him. And I'm sure everyone in the quiet section of the library loved me for bringing it.

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Teacher's Pet

A blonde walks into Walmart and straight back to the pet section. She examines the bettas, plucks a little red one off the shelf, and takes it up to the cashier.

"How much for this betta?" she asks, and then swipes her card without listening to the price, since the school will be reimbursing her for the fish anyway. The blonde leaves the store, fish in hand, and gets back in her car.


Does this sound like the start of a dumb blonde joke? It's not. It's the start of a very serious life-and-death drama, and it is a true story.


Here's a shocking confession: I am the blonde in this story. The red betta is my class pet, the honorable Brad Rudolph. The cashier will remain anonymous.

Wednesday: I took Brad Rudolph - BR, for short - from Walmart. I placed him securely in Cassidy Jane Carbaby. I brought him to my apartment.

Thursday morning: I brought him to school and slid him into his new home: a beautiful glass fishbowl perched on the windowsill, where he could watch all the kids play at recess. When my kids came in and noticed him, they loved him immediately.

Thursday afternoon: We named him. Aka, they named him.

Friday morning: We wrote letters to Brad Rudolph.

Friday afternoon: I thought to myself: won't BR need to eat over the weekend? I put Brad Rudolph in the little container I had bought him in and got him settled back in Cassidy Jane Carbaby. We got back to my apartment. I poured him into a bigger tupperware container, so he could have some wiggle room.


Saturday: uneventful.


Sunday: uneventful.


Monday morning: Disaster struck. I couldn't find BR's traveling case. I poked holes in a water bottle lid and pretended like that would be okay. I went over to the sink and tried pouring BR into the water bottle. Before I knew it, I had lost 96% of the water down the drain, and BR was still swimming frantically around in the inch of water left in the tupperware container.

I panicked. I tried to facilitate a gentle transfer by setting the water bottle in the container so BR could just swim right in, but that just made all these weird air bubbles rush out of the water bottle and into the water in the tupperware container, and that just made BR thrash around like a sad little piece of red seaweed.


Which was just as terrifying as it sounds! I'm not sure what happened next, but somehow I ended up trying to pick up BR with my bare hands from off of a dirty plate in the sink, and there was no water in the tupperware container, and there was barely a centimeter of water in the water bottle, and when I eventually managed to grab him and drop him in the water bottle, I remembered that he needed water, so I turned on the faucet for about half a second before I remembered that betta fish need special water that has water conditioner drops in it, and tap water will kill them....


So then I snapped off the tap water, appalled at myself, ran over to the shelves where Shannon has her betta fishes, and brought one of them over to the sink. That fish kindly shared some of his water with BR's water bottle. Then the other fish shared some of his water with BR, too.


I felt so bad the entire ride to school. I just kept checking my water bottle to see how poor little BR was holding up.

He seemed a little shaken, but he wasn't dead.  Just to be extra-careful, though, I didn't even turn on the radio the whole way there. I don't want my fish to be deaf any more than I want him to be dead!



At last we got to school and I was able to pour him back into his bowl.

Home, sweet home.

I tell my kids a lot; some might even say that I tell them too much. But you better believe that this is one story I did not share with them.