Monday, October 29, 2007

My akademik fortitood

I was helping out in DS1's 2nd/3rd grade class today, giving spelling pre-tests. When the last group that I did was correcting their own work, a couple of kids asked me questions about their math assignments and another about her homophones (didn't we used to call them homonyms?).

Then DS1 finished his math page while I was sitting right there, so I checked it over for him. It was about a dozen addition problems into the thousands with carrying. The really sad part was that I marked 3 of them wrong..... and he then had to show me how 2 of his original answers were right. *bonk head on desk* And he found the error in the 3rd one in about a second.

BUT as I am sitting here, I am once again pulled into the Free Rice game and I got my vocab level up to 50! OK, so some of the ones I have seen before, since I've played it a few times in the last few days, but I generally hover around 45. And OK, I couldn't maintain it at the 50 level, but I'm still hovering around 48 and 49 today :) But anyone know what "spile" means? I mean other than an Appalachian pronunciation of "spoil". Not a choice, sorry. Oh rats. It means plug, but I guessed wrong. Anyway, the sponsors of this game donate 10 grains of rice through the UN for every correct answer. It doesn't sound like much, but yesterday alone they donated 42 million grains of rice and since it started 3 weeks ago, they've donated 370+ million. How many grains in a serving?

And to my friends from Hiram: I knew the meaning of fulgent ;)

Also on the literary side, I was musing to myself as I lay face down with a heating pad on my back at the chiropractor's office this morning. I was trying to come up with cliches or bumper stickers or other short phrases to describe famous and popular works of literature. eg. Cormac McCarthy's The Road = "Life's a Bitch and then you Die" (or maybe "Waiting for Godot without the laughs"); Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights = "Mean People Suck" (or "It's all about ME").

Help me out here.

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