This observation will not come as a revelation to my closest friends. I'm sure over the years they have all noticed my inclination toward the stacked deck, the false shuffle, the card up the sleeve and the marked cards, not to mention the swindle, the con, the grift, and the three-card monte.
(This is a picture of Jim and Cory at the Casino in Pietermaritzburg, South Africa. As they appeared in their own imaginations.)
Hey, why are you looking at me so funny? What's wrong with what I said?
Oh, now I see. I guess my dyslexia must be acting up again. When I wrote, "I love to teach", I'm afraid I reversed a few letters. Obviously, what I had intended to write was, "I love to cheat!" That sounds much more like the Jim Dobson you know, doesn't it?
Sadly, though, I was expected to teach this morning at the Juvenile Jail. Which raises the question, "Haven't those children suffered enough?" I have to say, there was such a gloomy, negative attitude in the classroom from the first minute, it was hard to accomplish anything. Fortunately, when the students came into the classroom, they were able to mitigate my aura to a substantial degree. We did pretty well with the "order of operations" problems, despite the fact that my dictionary doesn't have a translation for "parenthesis" or for "operations into Swahili. So I just tried to pronounce the English words with a Swahili inflection. (Which raises the question, "Haven't those children suffered enough? I mean really!") Which is sort of like trying to talk to an Italian by speaking English except for adding "i" at the end of every word. Strangely, even when you speak really, really loudly as you do that, Italians still rarely understand. Gosh, they must be so dumb!
Anyway, my pidgin-Swahili, pidgin-mathematics teaching was somewhat successful. Actually, I am being too modest. It was tremendously successful. If you define "tremendously successful" as the students figured it out on their own and explained it to each other and only laughed softly at my strange version of their language. I will assure you, I am quite comfortable with that definition of "tremendously successful."
Tomorrow, as a reward for their tolerating me, I am taking them a surprise--fresh mangoes. By the way, here is an appropriate SAT analogy problem: Fresh, ripe mangoes for trees within 10 miles of the market :: mangoes sold in your finest grocery store. The correct answer is: Your favorite Ben & Jerry's ice cream :: the carton the ice cream comes in.
Of course, I do worry about the health of my students, so it would only be right that I eat a few bites of each mango before I pass them out to the kids. And, because I actually am more conscientious that I pretend, I promise to learn the Swahili words for "morbidly obese" before they become applicable to me. Which may mean I need a time machine, come to think of it. Who knew that fresh fruit and avocados as big as your head could produce a weight gain?
And, no, the avocado is not nearsighted. If you look closely, you should be able to see that those are reading glasses. In truth, this avocado is a follower of this particular blog. And a little smarter than the average follower, no doubt. Or, at least he was before he became a fat deposit around my midsection.
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