Think-Thank-Thunk

Clothes make the man. Naked people have very little or no influence in society.

“I’m not a vegetarian because I love animals. I’m a vegetarian because I hate plants.”
A. Whitney Brown

Teacher loses job, believes he’s a victim of disability discrimination.

His Logic:

1. Students tease me for being bald, call me “baldy”
2. I feel bullied and fear for my safety
3. I have to avoid students so I don’t get harassed or beat up
4. I lose my job because I can’t interact with students
5. I’m obviously being discriminated against because I don’t have any hair
6. Woe is me

One moment, you’re snacking peacefully on toast with peanut butter, the next, all hell breaks loose when a wasp starts dive-bombing random targets around the room.

The toast? Fuggetaboutit. One eye’s on the wasp, the other, frantically scanning for potential weapons–a fly swatter, a magazine, a shoe, a flame-thrower.

For the briefest of moments, you consider that toxic bug spray in the closet. Then you spot it. Sitting on the coffee table, not three feet away, is Al Gore’s, An Inconvenient Truth. The weapon of choice for desperate wasp killers.

Perfect.

You grab it, crouch, and do your best “harmless furniture” imitation, trying your best to blend in to your environment so as not to arouse suspicion. For a moment, the wasp hovers near the blades of a ceiling fan. Next, it bobs and weaves toward the wall. For what seems an eternity, it darts around a window. Maybe it dives at an armchair.

Adrenalin laced thoughts bounce around your skull.

Why can’t it just land and make it easy for me.

If it lands on the curtains, will I be able to squish it between the book and the wall?

Do wasp guts stain?

Maybe I should take a swing at it in mid-air.

Maybe, though, I’d just make it mad.

If I make it mad, will it fly down the front of my shirt, sting me mercilessly, then crawl up my neck and into my ear?

I wonder how that teacher dude in Karate Kid picked off that fly with a pair of chopsticks.

I wish I was him right now.

Meanwhile, pretending not to see you, the wasp bounces nonchalantly against the ceiling.

Suddenly it dives right at you, causing you to flail your arms and make panicky grunting noises.

The wasp, chuckling with satisfaction, glides back up to the ceiling fan, lands on one of the lights, turns, and appears to give you an obscene gesture.

What are you going to do? Trash a perfectly good light fixture? Even if you did take a swing, the bugger’s protected by the other lights, fan blades, and curved nature of the glass around the bulb.

And now you begin to grasp the reality of the situation: You could be at this all night.

Curses. Bloody Red Barron.

But it doesn’t have to be this way. And today I make my revenge by revealing an ancient technique I learned while studying in the orient. The same one I used on that actual unsuspecting wasp in the picture above.

Warning: the following pictures are of a graphic and violent act perpetrated against a real wasp that actually flipped me the bird.

Follow these steps exactly–there is no room for error. Failure to do so could result in death by wasp sting to the inner ear.

1. Quickly find a scissors.
2. Sneak up behind the wasp.
3. Using one fluid motion, thrust the scissors forward, snip, and slice the son-of-a-(insert bad word here) in two.

Usually all that’s left after that is to pick up the pieces. The only tricky part is getting close enough with your opened scissors before it takes flight. As risky as this seems, most wasps are so blinded by arrogance they never suspect any trouble. It’s not their experience that men, sneaking around light fixtures with toast crumbs on their face, are actually highly trained killing machines.

While I’ve never actually been stung doing this, you should know, while very slick, this technique is not completely foolproof.

Take tonight for instance.

After the wasp landed in the ceiling fan, I looked around for a scissors–but the only one I could find was one of those plastic-child-not-really-sharp-ones. Still, I didn’t think it would make a difference.

Maybe it didn’t. Maybe I just missed my mark. But what happened next wasn’t exactly by the book. Instead of cutting it in two, I somehow managed to only pinch its antennae between the tip of the scissor blades.

Don’t ask me how. It’s never happened before. In fact, I later called the office of Strange But Totally Cool Ways to Kill Dangerous Insects and they told me that the odds of this happening are actually like a bazillion to one.

Anyway, after having my daughter take a picture. I found another scissors in an old Swiss Army Knife and took care of business.

So, domestic men of the world, rejoice. No longer are we at mercy of this dangerous menace.

Just remember to wipe the food off your face when you’re done.

Once upon a time, in a land far, far away, there was a king living happily with his queen and two princesses. All was well in this particular kingdom until one evening. The king was putting the final touches on some speech or declaration and was just preparing to retire to the royal bedchamber when the queen came with news.

“Our daughter, the eldest princess, has informed me that she has a lump, and it pains her.”

The king’s eyes narrowed.

“It’s worrying her,” the queen continued. “It is not like her to welcome the doctor, but tonight she’s asked me to make an appointment with the royal physician. You know–and since her nanny just passed of cancer–this lump doth make her nervous.” Read the rest of this entry »

. . .but still not as magical as the “P” word (no not “please”, the other one).

We’re in the middle of a unit on persuasion right now. I love this unit because it’s so rich–it’s a great topic from which to teach so many cool things. Yes, students learn persuasive techniques so that they can better manipulate their parents and teachers, but we also hunt for these techniques when we read sales letters and advertisements (reading standards); we search for them on the radio and TV commercials (listening standards). Writing with these techniques requires discipline, a keen understanding of audience, and attention to details (writing standards). From a Language Arts perspective, it’s good stuff–great stuff.

But it’s also a blast because we get tap into a little psychology, human behavior, and begin to think a bit about thinking.

One of the mind benders I introduce is famously known (in psychological circles anyway) as the “The Copy Machine” study, conducted by Ellen Langer, the first woman to earn tenure as a professor of psychology at Harvard.

The following is an excerpt from an article originally published in the New York Times by Philip Hilts.

In that study, she stationed someone at a copy machine in a busy graduate school office. When someone stepped up and began copying, Dr. Langer’s plant would come up to the person and interrupt, asking to butt in and make copies. The interruption was allowed fairly often, about 60 percent of the time. But the permission was granted almost 95 percent of the time if the person stepping up to interrupt not only asked, ”May I use the copy machine?” but added a reason, ”because I’m in a rush.”

That seems to make sense. People heard the reason and decided they were willing to step aside for a moment. What was odd, Dr. Langer found, was that if the interrupter asked, ”Can I use the machine?” and added a meaningless phrase, ”because I have to make copies,” the people at the machine also stepped aside nearly 95 percent of the time.

The idea, she said, is that the listener at the copy machine heard a two-part statement: a request and something like a reason. That was all their mental script for such a situation required. They never did reflect on the fact that the interrupter’s ”reason” was not meaningful.

As a teacher, I get dozens of requests an hour. Most are fairly pedestrian:

• “Can I borrow a pencil?”
• “Can I go to my locker?”
• “Can I get a drink?”
• “Can I go to the bathroom?”

Now, after we learn a few persuasive techniques, I tell the students to persuade me. After learning about the power of the word “because,” most of them use that . . .because it’s relatively simple.

And it works even better than “please”. Still, most of them forget.

“Mr. Wondra, I need to go to the bathroom.”

“Persuade me,” I’ll say.

They’ll roll their eyes, sigh heavily, do a little potty dance.

“But Mr. Wondra! I REALLY have to go . . .BAD!”

I nod and smile. Eventually, they realize I’m not budging and so fumble around until they construct coherent request. After awhile they begin to do it automatically–or at least they remember after I look at them and say nothing.

I figure this is good teaching–reinforcing the content using a real world application–right? Plus I get to play the powerful-hoity-toity teacher role.

This was the case the other day. I was in the back of the room spot checking (quickly assessing) an assignment, when a fairly quite but confident a girl walked over.

“Mr. Wondra, can I go the bathroom?”

I looked up. There was a slight pause, but her expression never changed, and she never broke eye contact.

“. . .because I have my period.”

Talk about a persuasive argument. She knocked that one out of the park.