who knew

last week, we got some new veggies. One in particular interested me. We finally ate it tonight. It was kohlrabi. It looks like a circular potato base with big leaves coming out. We just cut it up and Mike had it on his salad, but I just ate mine with some salt on top. One of my favorite things is raw potato with salt. This tasted just like it. It's so nice and crunchy with not much taste, but would be great for dipping in things. I even tried dipping it in a little salsa, which was yummy. Another thing I did not know until today was that some kids are very emotionally attached to their particular method of multiplying. Now, for those of you who don't know, there is now the traditional method (what we learned at school), partial products (what I teach now) and this thing called lattice method, which they teach in 3rd and 4th grade. It's this weird boxy graphic organizer for multiplying and I hate it. I don't let my 5th graders use it. I'm teaching middle school math prep for summer school. We were talking about ways to multiply and I told the kids that we weren't going to use lattice because the middle school teachers don't like it. Cue crying kid screaming, "what do you mean i can't use lattice......" I sent him to the hallway where he proceded to climb under a table. After I got the rest of the kids started on their pre-test, I went to the hallway to talk. He was still crying but willing to talk and told me that he was, "going to fail middle school because he only knows lattice and I said he couldn't use it." whooops! We made a compromise where he can use it but we're going to try to learn some other ways. So it looks like it could be a long 3 weeks, considering all this happened within the 1st hour today.