Did Sinatra like Warm Coffee?

1. Clara has to do a Science report for school. She could pick the topic, so she decided to write about how a greenhouse works. She figures she can get some great pictures of the one sitting right next to her house, that Janet can tell her everything she needs to know, and since she works in Janet's greenhouse now, she is naturally wondering what the thing is supposed to be doing. Step two in the School-Mandated Paper-Writing Process was the requirement that Clara write down three questions she was going to answer in her paper. Her teacher crossed out all three of Clara's questions and wrote in a different set of questions. Now this is puzzling enough--I am not sure why Clara's questions were bad. Not only that, but Clara's first question was "Why is the greenhouse covered in plastic?--which is a pretty good questions one would think. The teacher crossed it out and wrote something else. Odd, I thought. Odder still was that Clara's third question was crossed out and the question the teacher wrote in was "What are greenhouses made of?" Great question, of course, but it sure looks like Clara's Question 1 to me--but what do I know?

That's not the funny part, though. The second question the teacher decided Clara needs to answer in her Science report on how a greenhouse works is:
What is the relationship between greenhouses and the greenhouse effect?
Egads! The charitable explanation of this is that the teacher is really trying to encourage Clara to write a paper about the earth's climate instead of the stated topic of how does a greenhouse work. The uncharitable explanation is that the teacher is terribly clueless. I, naturally enough, opted for the latter and was ready to encourage Clara to protest the teacher's anti-scientific bias. Janet thinks we should just make Clara write about the Greenhouse Effect even though it has absolutely nothing to do with explaining how a greenhouse works.

I could spend my whole life writing long letters to my kid's teachers about the errors of their ways.

2. On a similar note, Emma and Lily have the same Environmental Activist posing as a Science Teacher this year. One day this week, Emma's class was discussing Global Warming, and Emma expressed her skepticism about the whole matter. The teacher was not pleased. Later that day, Lily's class was discussing the same topic (different class, mind you--but when one is an environmental activist, all science is about environmental activism). Lily expressed her skepticism about the whole matter. The teacher then exclaimed, "I don't understand why my students are skeptical about this." Pity poor Janet, who is afraid that the Hartley girls are causing people to think their parents must be some sort of Right-Wing Wackos.

Last week, someone in another one of Emma's classes mentioned global warming, and a different kid in her class exclaimed "Global Warming is sooo 2008."

3. My friend Aimee told me last night that she is glad there are time stamps on these posts so she can tell how much caffeine I have had when I write because I sound different when I am on caffeine. I was glad to hear that the beneficial effects of caffeine are evidenced in my inimitable Prose Style--sometimes I worry that I have built up a tolerance to caffeine and that I am thus losing the wonderful effects that the substance has on brain-wave activities. As I tell everyone who will listen--caffeine makes you smarter. So drink more coffee. But not too much--if you drink 100 pots of coffee at a sitting, you will die. And we wouldn't want that. If someone died from a coffee overdose, who knows what the FDA would do?

4. Why don't my kids like Frank Sinatra? I am not a big fan of the whole Crooner genre of music, but Frank...well, Frank is amazing. But, every time I put him on, my kids exclaim, "No, not Frank."

5. Then again, I think they like listening to Frank more than they like listening to T.S. Eliot read "The Waste Land".