I tried to share a riddle which my mathy friend recently told me with an exceptional student this morning.  It is the riddle of the blue eyed islanders, a logic puzzle.

Interestingly, J could not move beyond the "reflection" solution (he even went so far as to suggest that folks could urinate on a large leaf into order to create a calm pool of water in which to see the reflection of their eye colour, lol!)  He also could not or would not sustain a logical line of thinking because he refused to move beyond the "social" aspect of the problem.  That is, when I tried to talk him through the "what if it's just one person, or two" initiating thinking step, he kept saying "well, why can't we all stay on the island?  I wouldn't mind if there were some blue-eyed people there, and I wouldn't make the missionary (guru) go home, either".  Hehe.

Well, if nothing else, it's nice to know that our young students are kind and generous, if not logical, lol!

It is an inevitability that when you get seven boys under age 10 together in one small house, you will need at least one ice pack.

Sure enough,  within an hour of visiting our friends Vida and Kofi and their merry men with dinner this evening, one triplet had fallen down the stairs, while one of our twins had bashed his head against the wall.  Happily, their brood is well trained, and almost immediately, one of their twins returned from the freezer with an ice pack for each goose egg!

Ahhhh, what fun, what fun... the boys are all old enough now to go play outside on their own, so once again, we adults enjoyed a half hour of luxurious lethargy on the couches in the living room while the rambunctious little monkeys  burned off some energy on the relatively safe playground outside after dinner.

“Sing to the Lord a new song,
for he has done marvelous things!” (Psalm 98)

I flew a plane all by myself on Sunday morning. Imagine that!  For photos and more, check out my flight blog and/or lesson entry.

It’s mornings like this that affirm my decision to live in a small apartment by the lake.  The openness and solitude of the water, especially at sunrise, provides the ideal backdrop for the most incredible soundscapes and visual feasts more magnificent than can possibly be imagined.

Let me try to capture just a few snippets of this morning’s graphic symphony…

Amidst a cocophony of early rising birds, a small swarm of bats had ventured out from the trees where they had been roosting, and made quite a show over the water, their tiny, dark bodies flitting back and forth against the palest pink beginning to peek out over the horizon.  As pink turned to ruby and eventually gold, the bats dissappeared into the branches along the shoreline.  A few silently drifting swans began to stir along the water’s edge, where they had been gently bobbing in the morning swell.  One noisy fellow decided to announce the day with a loud honk, waking some neighbouring geese, who joined in the chorus.

Across the sky, a big, round moon still hung low in the sky, pregnant with expectation and surrounded by a halo of yellow and white.  Determined not to be chased from his stage too quickly by the rising sun, he made quite the display over the city, the halo glimmering out over the rooftops against the morning twilight.

The water itself was calm… for the first time in many weeks, almost no wind.

A perfect morning.

The thing about teaching is that unlike some jobs or professions, it permeates every aspect of our lives. 

I am, have always been, in the very fabric of my being, a teacher.  My concern over the sleep-deprived grade 4 student dealing with seemingly insurmountable challenges at home does not end when the bell rings at 3:15 p.m.  My conversations as a second-year

An interesting conundrum that often arises in the minds and conversations of some teachers is the idea of language and thought, i.e. which precedes which?

A number of studies have shown that students with a more well-developed vocabulary tend

Six months ago, I started learning to fly, in part to humble myself by attempting something I had NO IDEA how to approach.

Although learning about aviation has indeed been (and continues to be!) a humbling experience, more surprisingly and effectively humbling are the effects of an unexpected

Well, once the novelty of lounging around in one's jammies reading aloud a few good books together wears off, and the demands of the sick kid overtake you, it's hard not to

Dinner with the twins/triplets tonight... 3 giant pizzas and a salad...  AND.... lots of books!  We brought my new favourite, "The Black Book of Colours", as well as "Something Beautiful", which I snuggled up and read with one twin, one triplet and Simon.  After we read together, Jeffrey (the older twin) wanted to read it again, this time him aloud to me.

It was something beautiful to be reading with a dear little friend on a Friday night.

I remember the first time I heard and understood the word, "fatality".  It was Grade 6.  My friend Chris, from school, had just survived a lethal house fire, and had made the front