Greetings, GreenMount Community,
Today,
our fourth and fifth grade students will be visiting the planetarium at Towson
University, and between now and the end of the year, several other field trips
are also planned. We will visit a few museums,
including the “Newseum”. We have plans
to see actual printing presses in operation and, of course, we have our camping
trips coming up. In fact, next week,
seventh and eighth grade students will be camping at Catoctin in Western
Maryland. This is a great site and
wonderful for hiking.
As a teacher, I
took students on field trips to Catoctin myself as part of our study of
Maryland. An interesting experience
occurred as we took a longer and different route on one hike. We strayed from the marked trail and it
wasn’t until we were confronted by two armed U.S. Marines that we realized that
we were close to Camp David. That was
one of those memories of Mr. Warner’s class that my former students still talk
about today. Another was when I was
demonstrating centrifugal force by swinging a bucket of water over my head to
show that the force of the orbit of the bucket would keep it from coming
out. What the students really learned
was that when a bucket’s arc is interrupted by an overhead light fixture the
water will come out directly on the person swinging the bucket. I was a great science teacher!
Being
the science teacher that I was (am), I will be conducting an experiment at
lunch on Wednesday. It’s a simple
experiment. I will weigh our two trash
cans before students discard their trash and then once all the trash is
collected. The reason for this
scientific activity is that it is apparent to me that our children throw away
great quantities of food, especially on pizza day. Whole slices are often discarded, and most
students do not finish their pizza on Wednesdays. I have talked to the students about wasting
food and about how fortunate they are to have such abundance in their
lives. I will let the students know the amount
of food they discard and then help them determine how many pizzas the discarded
food would equal (based on the weight of one pizza). Only discarded pizza will be placed in one
can so as not to contaminate the experiment with other trash (very scientific).
The
point, parents, is that we all need to impress on our children the need to
conserve the resources we have and also to make sure that when you pay for your
child to eat pizza, he/she is actually eating it. Please note that they have plenty of time to
eat and I encourage anyone not finished to move to the risers and take their
time with their food.
You better cut the pizza in four pieces because I’m not hungry enough
to eat six. – Yogi Berra
Cheers,
Steve
