Conversation of the Week

De-evolution

Husband: What do you want to be when you grow up?
Bird: Five.
Husband: Oh, you'll be five, eh? But what do you want to do?
Bird: I'll be a teacher.
Husband: You mean like Ms. A and Ms. M {her Preschool Teachers}?
Bird: Yes. But when I'm five, I'll be the teacher.
Husband: Oh, good. And what will Bug be when he grows up?
Bird: Shamu.
Husband: So he'll splash everybody in the pool?
Bird: Yeah. He'll splash everyone with his big tail.
Husband: But Bug doesn't have a tail.
Bird: He will when he's ten.

School Thought For the Day

Considering my recent kerfluffles with Bird starting school, I found this quote to be particularly refreshing today.

"Our school education ignores, in a thousand ways, the rules of healthy development."

Elizabeth Blackwell

Bird's prescreen for kindergarten is next Wednesday. Fingers crossed.

How do you want to live your life?

Eventually, we are all going to die. It's inevitable.

The difference between most of us and Dr. Randy Pausch is that we don't have as defined an idea as to WHEN that might happen. He has very aggressive pancreatic cancer, and it continues to return & spread. As a professor at Carnegie-Mellon University, he was given the opportunity to give a last lecture to his students before he 'retired' in order to spend more time with his family.

This past January (I believe), he reprised the talk on Oprah. This video is about 10 minutes long, but well worth watching.




You can check out Randy's home page here. He has links to his current health status, as well as links to the entire lecture.

(Thanks Jess, for posting the link to the video.)

Thought for the Day

“The gospel of Satan is not a system of revolutionary principles, nor yet a program of anarchy. It does not promote strife and war, but aims at peace and unity. It seeks not to set the mother against her daughter nor the father against his son, but fosters the fraternal spirit whereby the human race is regarded as one great ‘brotherhood.’ It does not seek to drag down the natural man, but to improve and uplift him. It advocates education and cultivation and appeals to ‘the best that is within us.’ It aims to make this world such a comfortable and congenial habitat that Christ’s absence from it will not be felt and God will not be needed.”


–-A.W. Pink (1886–1952)

hat tip to the ladies here

Thought for the Day

I read this in someone's email signature:

There are two ways to slide easily through life;
to believe everything or to doubt everything.

Both ways save us from thinking.

- Alfred Korzybski

Sentiments I Hope She Keeps

A conversation between Bird and I this morning:

B: (as she snuggles into me) Mommy, I love you.
J: I love you too sweetheart.
B: I love Daddy, and Bug too.
J: I love Daddy and Bug as well.
B: And I love MYSELF!!
J: I'm glad to hear that.
B: Do you love yourself Mommy?
J: Yes, I do.
B: So we both love EVERYONE!

Sounds good to me. Wish more people had that thought.

Quoth Husband

"You know, this kind of falls on the list of stuff I never thought I would know."

"What are you talking about?"

"Bird and I are playing Memory and I know the names of all these Disney Princesses!!"

Sure enough, he did.

Wise words from a student

Every once in a while I write a scientist/science-like quote on the board & have my students write a response to it. It's very stream-of-conscious, straight-from-the-hip (hmmm... any more cliches in there?!), and they are prepared to share if I call on them.


I was reading the entries from one of my classes today, and one girl opened with these sentences that I absolutely loved:


I don't think knowledge is worthless. I just believe that knowledge without imagination is useless.

Thought for the Day

All three levels of my chemistry classes have been learning about the dual nature of light in some form for the past week. Two of them (Honors & AP) have been learning about how Max Planck really pioneered the idea that light is not only a wave but also acts like a particle. Thing was, though, that nobody really believed him, even though he had experimental evidence. (and, as far as we know today, he was right).

He was lucky. Einstein came along a mere 5 years later... When he proposed the Photoelectric effect, he essentially confirmed what Planck had been saying all along.

I mention all this because recently I came across a quote by Max Planck that I really loved:

A scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.

Hmmmmm.

So does that make him a Sugar Daddy or a Boy Toy?

spoken by a college coed in the parking lot:
"no! he's not 40! actually, he looks old but he's really only 17."