Lessons Learned

WALK-IN TALL:  This morning, we headed down the hill (Magnolia), through the valley (Interbay) and up the hill (Queen Anne). Not an arduous jaunt - about seven minutes in all. Our destination - a "walk in" (as opposed to a walk out or a sit in).

On board were a couple dozen lil' banana-zucchini bread owls. We whipped them up last night, because nothing says FUND OUR SCHOOLS like banana-zucchini bread, right?! 

The civics exercise was a (very small) part of a statewide effort to send a (very loud) message to the Washington state legislature to fund K-12 education. As outlined by our state's constitution, Article IX, specifically: "It is the paramount duty of the state to make ample provision for the education of all children residing within its borders, without distinction or preference on account of race, color, caste, or sex."

The problem is, the legislature isn't doing its job, not by a long shot. In fact, they're in contempt of the state supreme court, and have been for a long while at this point. In fact, since last August, the court ordered the state to pay penalties of $100,000 PER DAY for, in effect, dereliction of duty.  It's disgraceful, really. Public schools are slipping ever deeper into categories of "haves" and "have nots" as school budgets are met by well monied local or special interests rather than state-wide support. 

We're only at a local public school about four hours a week, but with two sons in the education game as teachers, and as someone who went to public schools K-12, I'm a huge supporter. So we baked banana-zucchini owls. :)

And colored on posters which were delivered to Olympia later in the day.

 CJ wrote = FOR ALL in the lower corner of the poster below. I appreciated the fact he first wrote L-L-A backward, on the low line, so he could properly space the word and symbol above it. :)  A future engineer, perhaps? 

By the way, if you haven't already, go back up above and spot the owl missing its beak. (And in case you're wondering the beaks were little marshmallow wedges painted with food coloring.)

PEMDAS: As we worked on math this morning, part of which involved knowing the proper operational order of solving an equation, Annabelle offhandedly shared with CJ and me that there was a great TED-Ed video on the topic involving a dragon.

Intrigued, we dialed it up on YouTube and learned about the six musketeers of math, PEMDAS, an acronym for parenthesis, exponents, multiplication, division, addition, subtraction, the order in which you work a problem. Check it out here: https://youtu.be/H6syI3xiBBg


IT'S A GAS: This afternoon when CJ and Annabelle were practicing guitar, they were at an impasse about what song to play next, I suggested "Classical Gas" and was met with two blank stares. 

Thanks to the magic of the Internet, we dialed it up  (Mason Williams' hit version) and they got to hear it for the first time (and I heard it for the first time in like 40 years!).

As we listened, we talked about what we were hearing. ... Flamenco or Spanish guitar. Sounds like a Spaghetti Western soundtrack or "The Prisoner" theme, horns a la Herb Alpert, James Bond-ish.

All of those are legit labels, I think, especially given the song's time. It was 1968 when it hit number two on the Billboard charts.