Winter Sky

A winter sunset...
...and Jack Frost on my kitchen window...


Terribly frigid weather today-- 8 degrees with a -25 degree windchill. The roads are frozen over-- they "plow" here, which merely means they push the snow around without actually removing it from the roads, so there is this frozen slush layer over a layer of pure ice-- it is lovely. Even with brand new tires I am not too confident on it. Still, it's very pretty.

The kids were great today-- most were eager to get right back into the old grind. It's funny how much they want routine, even though they fight it and whine and complain when I make them work. We had a great discussion today about how numbers look different on a calculator-- we have been talking about factors for several weeks now, and they are getting really good about making predictions, and one of the kids insisted that 3 is a factor of 72, and another kid was adamant that it wasn't . I showed the kids how to skip-count using a calculator-- you type in the number you want to count by-- 3, in our case-- then press the "+" button and then 3 again, and then keep hitting the equals sign to skip-count. Well, this didn't solve the problem, and we figured out why-- to a kid with learning disabilities, a digital 72 can look identical to a digital 75! Now wonder they couldn't tell if 72 was divisible by 3--they couldn't "see" (correctly interpret) the numbers! So we talked about calculators and digital watches, and how the displays can't make curves or circles, so the numbers look weird. Nobody had ever sat down and explained this to the kids, so all this time they thought the calculators were wrong! So we spent the rest of the class "writing in digital" and the kids thought that was great.

There is a little girl in one of the classrooms that I like to visit, and I found out that over this vacation her house burned down. I know she's okay and I believe the rest of her family is too, but it just makes me sad. I drove by there today and there is nothing left-- just a charred black shell. This seems to happen to at least one family here in this town every year, and this year it just seems more terrible than usual. You wonder if these families were out of gas or oil and were trying to heat their house in some other manner-- a space heater or even a coleman stove-- and something catches. And with the prices as high as they are you wonder just how Dickensian their living situations are-- it can't be good. Very sad.