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Saturday, November 20, 2010

Colors...

You would think that an average college graduate with a BS degree in math and more than 30yrs of professional computer software programming experience, WITH an unrelated additional six years of experience substitute teaching at all elementary grades from Kinder through sixth grades would be able to handle any 3rd grade worksheet without too much difficulty. Yea, that was my personal misconception up until this week in a 3rd grade classroom.

The science lesson was to complete a worksheet on “The Parts of Plants” which include classifying, identifying parts of plants, what each part does and finally coloring plant pictures with crayons.

Guess which part was my downfall.

“What color is fuchsia?” the boy in a Raiders t-shirt asked. I didn’t have a clue. In fact I thought fuchsia WAS a flower, not a color.

“Uhhh, let me see the worksheet” is my standard stalling tactic when they have me stumped. The sheet pictured four plants and a numbered coded color diagram to indicate what colors to use.

Red, green, blue, peach and even red-orange are pretty straightforward. But there at #11 was “Fuchsia”. I was hoping to get a clue when I see that the plant part for #11 was the flower part and not something easy like the bark of a tree (brown). I sent him off to ask some buddies in class to see what color THEY might decide to use.

Next came two girls lugging a huge plastic bin with what looked like a couple thousand loose crayons asking: “What color crayon is cerulean? We can’t find it in here.” I sent them off as well. The kids eventually DID find the “cerulean” and “fuchsia” crayons in the big box.

I used them to mark a copy of the worksheet (below) to bring home and ask if this was supposed to be common knowledge among the average, intelligent, unbiased adult female that happens to be married to clueless male.

Turns out, it IS!



5 comments:

Super Sub said...

That's one crazy worksheet! At this point in the year I've seen kids that have lost most of their crayons already. They spend the whole class looking to borrow a red or blue crayon. I can't imagine hunting for fuchia or cerulean. Nuts!

LSquared32 said...

Silly male--fuchia is the color you use when tie-dying and you want something just a bit brighter than red (a really bright purple-red-pink). OK--not everyone in the world thinks of color in terms of tie dye outcomes. Never mind...On the other hand, SuperSub has a great point. I don't think I have a fuchia crayon. I bet a dictionary would have helped here! (There are colors that are not in my tid-dye palate and I have to look them up)

Liz A. said...

I don't know why they can't say pink and blue. Seriously!

BTW, I gave your blog an award (see my blog). My way of saying that I enjoy your blog.

Jene said...

Whoever made that worksheet has too much time on their hands and doesn't realize that most kids don't have the Big Box of Crayola's at their desk. Our school only has the kids get the box with 8 colors.

chrissyrudd said...

Don't you just love learning new things at your job! I learned just this morning that the main character's name in "The Jungle" by Upton Sinclair is pronounced with a Y sound, not J. Jurgis = Yer-gis. Ah, well, even fooled the "real" lit teacher.