Glowing Reviews.

I'm a bit of a weather junkie.

So, this morning I dutifully watched the local news and verified that today was going to be a bit warmer with a small possibility of scattered showers.

Note the small possibility part...

We noticed at lunch that it was raining and pretty dark out. Not raining hard, but it was definitely gloomy outside.

However.

During sixth period we had almost made it to the end of the class when the thunder began rumbling and we could hear the wind blowing pretty hard and the rain was crashing down on the roof. One of my kids came from an errand to the office and mentioned that it was pouring sheets out there.

And then the power went out.

Oh wonderful.

Luckily my emergency light was working and my laptop switched to battery. No internet, no phone, but at least we could play a game of candy vocabulary while we waited for the lights to come on.

And waited.

And waited.

We went through several rounds of candy vocabulary and the kids were getting restless. I dug through my desk and found my glow-in-the-dark fluorescent chalk and my flashlight that has a blacklight setting. No batteries. Dang it! I dug around, found some batteries, loaded it up and joy of joys, it worked! Next, I grabbed some of our free poster paper (from a local publishing company that donates scraps to us) and found some that was pretty dark in color.

"Hey, look at this," I told my kids (thankfully this is my smallest class so it's no big deal to have them circle around a table and watch me demonstrate something.)

I gave a kid the blacklight, and grabbed one of the chalk pieces and started drawing a cell. As soon as the orange chalk hit the paper it was illuminated by the blacklight.

"Ohhhhhhhh," said the kids in unison. "That's cool!"

I proceeded to draw a cell and had the kids tell me what organelles I was drawing. "That's a mitochondrion!", they'd yell. "Oh, look, a chloroplast!"

A great way to review, even in the dark, eh?

I think we were almost disappointed when the lights came on ten minutes before the end of the school day!

Shake, Rattle and Roll!

Holy Crap.

4:36 am and I am awakened, as usual, by the feline alarm clocks known as Morgan and Duke. A couple of seconds later we have an earthquake.

An earthquake! In Tennessee!!

I grew up and spent 30 years in Los Angeles, so believe me, I know earthquakes. And this was definitely an earthquake.

And although I know the New Madrid fault is nearby, the last thing I was expecting this morning was a quake.

There's a teachable moment in here somewhere. Time to whip out one of my favorite books, "A Crack In the Edge of the World" by Simon Winchester, and toss today's lesson out the door and pull one together on quakes.

Gosh, I hate earthquakes, but I love teachable moments.

Teachable Moment

We started in on our weather unit yesterday.

This is one of my favorite units to teach because I'm a weather junkie. Part of this stems from growing up in Southern California where the weather doesn't change much at all and can put you into a stupor. I fell in love with weather when I lived in the Midwest and realized that it can do some pretty amazing things beside be hazy and mid-70's with a touch of fog in the morning. This is also a unit that the kids have background information on so they can easily relate to the content. They can tell stories about the big hail storm they were in, or the tornado they saw when they were five, or the time they went sledding in the snow.

And find me a seventh grader that won't stare entranced at a video on tornadoes and hurricanes and massive destruction. They love this stuff.

So it's a real shame that I won't be able to teach this after next year because they've changed our standards and are moving this unit to the sixth grade.

In any case, we were only on our second day of the unit and had spent most of the period working on some of the terms we needed to know such as dew point, humidity, relative humidity, weather, and so on. We had five minutes left so I had them pack up while I showed them my favorite weather site, the one put out by The National Weather Service. I love it because it doesn't have ads and you can spend all day clicking on links and finding cool weather information. It's fast and it's accurate. It had been raining pretty much all day, so there were cool radar images to look at as well which the kids really like. And amazingly enough, nearly all our vocabulary words are used in context on the page - how's that for relevance?

So, I pull up the page for our town, and was going to show them how to read it and I notice that we are under a tornado warning.

I look over at Mr. Title, and say, "Wow, we're under a tornado warning!"

And at that instant the tornado alarm goes off in The School.

The kids stand up and look at me, probably wondering how I fixed it so we had a tornado drill during our weather unit. I bark at them to get down in the tornado position against the interior walls, go to shut my door, grab a kid from my first period who is at his locker and send him in the room. Mr. Social Studies is at his door, pulling it shut. "Not a drill, is it?" he asks. "Nope. Not a drill".

By this time Mr. Title has all the kids down on the floor and he looks over at me. I point down to the floor and we both get down.

This kids are kind of giggly and squirming for a minute or two and then it dawns on them, when the annoying beeping didn't stop, that this really isn't a drill. This is real. After a few minutes we could hear the sirens going off in the neighborhood, and then the rain got really loud and the thunder a lot more intense.

I can't believe we didn't lose power.

After about ten minutes the annoying beeping stops and The Principal comes over the loudspeaker and tells us that we're still under the warning but she wanted to give us a break from the alarm (bless her!) and we are to stay put in the tornado position until further notice. The kids are getting restless so I take the remote to my LCD projector, which gets cable television, and was able to get the local news station that does great weather reports onto the screen so they could at least hear what was going on.

After a total of 30 minutes the all clear sounded and we were able to get up off the floor and back into our seats. The Principal asked us to all stay in our 5th period classes until further notice, so Mr. Social Studies and I kept the local news so the kids could watch the storm's progress. By the time it was all over, and the 8th graders were able to finish their lunch that was interrupted by the warning, it was nearly seventh period. We dismissed at our normal time which was a relief because I had visions of being stuck at school with these kids until the storm system passed. Fortunately it wasn't too wide and it moved fast.

I hope this isn't a sign of things to come this spring when tornado season really begins in earnest.

However, how often can you be in front of your class talking about weather and watches and warnings and actually have one happen??? Amazing!

Crunchy, crunchy grass

I grew up in Southern California, the Land of Perpetual Drought, so I know a little about dry weather. To this day, fifteen years since I left The Golden State, I still am somewhat obsessive about wasting water. You spend a childhood having things such as "don't wash your car unless you're parked on grass", and "don't run the water while you brush your teeth", yammered at you all the time, you tend to have the habit of conservation somewhat ingrained.

However, I've never seen anything like the drought we're undergoing right now in My Beloved South. Southern California, after all, is brown most of the year. It's part of the landscape and it has its own desperate beauty. Here, however, we're used to green most of the year - green trees, green lawns, full green flowering shrubs, you name it. We're used to mowing the lawn at least once a week and sometimes complaining that we can't get it done in between rainy days and thunderstorms.

We haven't mowed our lawn in six weeks. Hubby gets out and weed wacks a bit here and there because weeds apparently can survive anything, but our mower has been used maybe three times since spring. The grass crunches. Even the crabgrass is looking stressed and I'm under the assumption that nothing can kill crabgrass (because I've tried just about everything). This is a a somewhat blurry picture of my lawn, or what's left of it. I don't have a decent digital camera so rely on my cell phone camera which is a pain to use in the sun - I can't see what I'm taking pictures of!!

I've also taken a picture looking down the street and you can tell that all the lawns are in bad shape. From the pictures you can't tell how bad the trees are faring, but it isn't pretty. Many of them are losing leaves and what leaves they have left are starting to get brown and burned looking on the edges. According to the folks at the National Weather Service we have had no rain for the month of August. None. The result of this is, according to the news, higher electric rates because most of our power comes from the TVA which is primarily hydroelectric. The rivers are down and aren't generating the amount of power we need, especially since we're breaking records left and right with triple digit temperatures for days on end.

Many cities and communities are starting to go with water restrictions. The drinking water itself is tasting really muddy and musty right now because the warm weather and slow moving river water (where most of the communities get their drinking water) is perfect for algae to bloom, so it's going gangbusters. The result is nasty. It's safe to drink but tastes pretty repulsive.

As a teacher, especially one who gets to teach about weather, this is one of those situations that I can pull into a quick 2-3 minute lesson. We don't teach weather much until later in the year (right now I'm working on matter), but when the kids are talking about how hot it is and how the water tastes icky and how people are dying in Memphis because of the heat, well, that's a teachable moment. After all, these kids are getting onto school buses at 2:15 in the afternoon when the outside temperature is at least 100 degrees...I don't want to even imagine what the temperature is inside the buses. This is some science they can relate to.

And in the meantime, I'm going to stomp around and whine and complain because all my efforts at gardening are just burning up. The begonia below is croaking despite being tenderly watered nearly every other day...but the days on end of this heat is not something this plant is obviously used to. Poor thing.