That's not how I remember it.

I saw a fascinating play this evening at First Presbyterian Theater.  "Faith Healer" is the story of a possibly sincere faith healer and his wife and manager who travel for years through Scotland and Wales, doing one night stands offering miracles of healing, sometimes with quite successful results but not always. The story is told by the three characters, each doing a lengthy monologue, and you fairly quickly realize that they each have very different memories of the same events. In his notes in the program the director comments that often members of a family will retell remembered events differently. I know this happens when my brother and I sometimes recall an incident from our childhood.  We never seem to remember it quite the same way. I think we are always trying to portray ourselves in the best possible light or as the victim depending on the circumstance.  That's just what happened in this play, leaving the audience wondering who, if anyone, is telling what truly happened during various landmark events that they all remembered. 

at the Arena

Some friends and I attended the play at the Arena Dinner Theater this evening, "Rehearsal for Murder". The dinner was quite good; stuffed pork chop, baked sweet potato (with brown sugar and butter, yumm) and pumpkin pie for dessert. Also peas and a salad but who cares about those?  The play was very good - a true murder mystery; a play within a play, with plenty of misdirection and a satisfactory plot twist at the end.  Some of the acting was a little spotty but the main characters played their parts very well.  All in all, it was a very entertaining and tasty evening.

more musings about math

Still thinking about my new tutoring effort. A few years ago I was doing some substitute teaching in the Fort Wayne Community Schools system and ended up teaching math to special ed students at a high school. The students were fine and I understood the material, even though I hadn't worked with algebra for several years.  It was obvious that most of the students were really struggling with the equations, though, and I found myself wondering why these students weren't being taught basic math skills; addition, subtraction, multiplication, division. I asked another teacher, at the end of the day, why these students were expected to learn algebra? Her answer - it's what's required by state and federal guidelines. 
Last week I took some tutor training for a program we run on Mondays after school at our church. We do one on one tutoring for an hour with third through fifth graders who are struggling with reading and/or math. The speaker who led us through ideas to be used to reinforce their math skills (and they were good ideas) stressed that she thinks it's very important that students learn the basics, specifically the multiplication tables. I asked her if the multiplication tables were printed in the students' math books, remembering the pages of tables we always had at the back of our books when I was in elementary school. That's how I remember learning math facts, by reading and memorising and being able to see how the sequences went together. Her answer was "Well, no, there are no tables in the back of the books. We just use flash cards." I'm glad they are stressing basic math facts again, but really, would it be so bad to give them some reference material? or would that, like a calculator, be 'cheating'?

Is this cheating?

I recently started working with a young man who wants a little tutoring, especially in math. He's in his 20s, articulate, a pretty good reader, but feels the need to be more fluent in math.  We were talking the other day and, when I asked him how he does math now, he explained that he uses a calculator, then went on to say "but I know that's cheating." Now I am definitely a believer in teaching students the basics of math.  I think they should know the multiplication tables and basic approaches to calculation but I was surprised that he thought using a calculator was cheating. I thought about it a little bit, then asked him "If you were building a bookcase, and needed to nail some boards together, would you consider it cheating to use a hammer, and try to pound those nails in with your fist?" He laughed at that but he got the point. I told him that if he was in school and taking a test where he had been told not to use a calculator, then to use one would be cheating, but out in the real world it is a good thing to use whatever tools are available to get the job done, and a calculator is a very useful tool. Then I casually mentioned that when I was in grade school we didn't have calculators and that brought up the question of when I graduated from high school. When I told him 1962, he looked at me like that was just inconceivable. Boy do I feel old.

a new title

A friend told me that she and her husband have given me a new name after I managed to pretty much ignore the fire in my apartment complex last night. Granted, it was a very small fire and quickly out but they still think I was pretty oblivious so now I'm "Ms. Oblivious". Little do they know that I actually should have earned this title years ago.  When I was a teenager, one hot summer afternoon I fell asleep while reading in my bedroom and woke up an hour and a half later to find out that I had slept through a visit to our house from the local volunteer fire department. It turns our that our clothes dryer, down in the basement, had started smoking quite amazingly and Mom called the fire department. They came, big red engine, lots of volunteers in their cars, sirens blaring, and put out the non-fire quite quickly while I slept.  They left, more quietly than they had come and I slep on. When I woke up I was told the whole story of what I missed. Which just goes to show that being oblivious is nothing new to me.

Where's the Fire???

So I'm peacefully watching a TV program and get a text from my son asking if I'm OK. It seems he heard a news report that my apartment building was on fire. Within the next few minutes I had a call and a text from my brother and a friend asking the same thing. Meanwhile, I had heard no sirens, smelled no smoke and figured there must be a mistake somewhere.  I walked out on my balcony and saw a fire engine and some police cars parked at the Superior Street entrance to our parking lot.  Now I was curious, so I checked news reports and saw a really dramatic picture on the WPTA web site; a huge billowing cloud of smoke coming out of the top of the east building. I live in the north building, happily. Turns out there was a kitchen fire in a 14th floor apartment in that building.  It's all out now, but it has me thinking. Perhaps I should invest in some sort of fire escape, perhaps a rope ladder?  I was explaining to my youngest brother the other day how I figure I could leap from my balcony to the trees across the parking lot and they would break my fall. They look soft and fuzzy from up here. However he informed me that if I can't jump the width of the parking lot to the tree line on ground level I won't be able to do it from 10 floors up. What a buzzkill, but he might be right. So now I will research portable fire escapes. 

I almost missed it.

Yikes, that was close. I've been gone most of the day and just learned that today is National Homemade Cookie Day. I heard it on TV so it must be true, right?? It's too late now to bake up a batch of cookies (or I'm too lazy) but, lucky for me, my freezer is stocked with cookies from the Johny Appleseed Festival. Now these cookies weren't baked in my home but they were mixed and baked at my home church and sold at a festival in my home town. Close enough. Excuse me while I go celebrate this excellent special day.