Wow, I just read my last entry and it seems like I wrote that forever ago. What's new?
Well, I did go geocaching last weekend. On Friday, the boy and I went and scoped out a site to hide our geocache, but discovered that there are about a half dozen in the area already, so that's out. Darn. We've got a great box of toys to hide, but we don't know where to put it. On one hand, we'd like it fairly easily accessible, so that we get lots of visitors. On the other hand, we want to hide it in a cool place, a place that we want people to see, that they may have not gone to on their own. We're pretty stuck.
On Sunday we went to the "event cache" which turned out to be old people sitting in a smallish desert garden. Yep. Pretty lame. But there was a good vibe to it. We were amazed. The most prolific geocachers in the state of Arizona were there, and they're middle-aged and overweight. It's crazy. I mean, I feel like I'm too out of shape to do a lot of the caches, and here are all these older fat people who are gung ho about the sport. We might go to another "event cache" in Prescott the first weekend of May, dunno though.
I went to SHS twice this week. I actually stayed and observed the AP Chemistry class. The class is doing the exact same thing the Chem II course here at NAU is doing. The AP kids were all about grades today. I don't know how they normally are, but they didn't pay much attention because they were all obsessing over their GPAs. You know, if they paid more attention to the teacher, they wouldn't have to worry so much about grades.
The regular chemistry class did demonstrations with liquid nitrogen. We froze flowers and balloons and gum and lotion and almost whatever the kids wanted to try. I showed them how a magnet will hover over superconducting metal when the metal is cooled to critical temperature. The kid scientists on David Letterman did that not too long ago. It's amazing to see how the different classes reacted to the demonstrations. In the first class a few boys wanted to freeze just about anything- credit cards, money, pens, highlighters, paper, erasers... In the second class, they weren't very interested. When asked what else they wanted to cool off, they just kind of shrugged their shoulders. The third class crowded around, they all wanted to do it themselves. They were really into freezing flowers and gum. It was a good time. I got to do pretty much all of the presentation by myself in the third class. I'm supposed to teach an entire lesson in two weeks, so this was a way of easing me into it. Hey, I'll stand behind a counter and smash frozen flowers any day.
My group is meeting again tonight to work on our curriculum guide. We worked on the philosophy and rationale last night. Didn't get them finished, but we started on them. We are so unmotivated. The other two group members are just absolutely sick of the class, and I'm just lazy. I'm not getting enough sleep, I'm doing my best to not think of the future, and I've got a lot of projects to do. Speaking of projects, I have to go find three websites with inquiry lesson plans on them. And the lesson plans have to fit with this prescribed formula for inquiry lessons that my instructor gave me. Sucky. I hate stuff like this.