The Pocket Professor

We've been talking about World War One in history class for quite some time now. As is logical, we started with the causes, then the war itself, and now we're on the results and impact. Usually, Mr. Majask puts up a PowerPoint and talks about it for most of the hour, and we take notes and ask questions. Recently, however, he's found an online resource and put it to good use: the Portable Professor. Or, as we have ever so affectionately renamed the concept, the Pocket Professor. The main idea is that a professor from a well-known university (in our case, Margaret MacMillan from the University of Oxford) records a series of lectures about a given topic, and teachers, students, or whoever's interested can buy them as CDs and listen. We've always joked (affectionately, of course) that Mr. Majask likes to make his life easier in as many ways as possible, and now he's given us another opportunity by having someone else lecture for him. Also, after about the third or fourth lecture, he started using PowerPoints that are made to go along with the lectures. Word has spread that Mr. Giromini practically started worshiping him when he found out, and he's joked about trying to find a Pocket Professor for physics (or, as he referred to it in class the other day, "puh-hisix"). Anyway, we heard the last lecture a few days ago, and had our review day after that, with our real-live professor:) To be honest, (and to end the post on a positive note,) I think Margaret was more helpful to me than I'm letting on. But if you ask me about that later, I'll deny it. Fair warning. Besides, as Mary put it, "It's so easy to tune out if it can't yell at you!"

IAtionary: DiFrenchiate

Di-French-i-ate [dih-FRENCH-ee-eyt] v.

1. To distinguish one language from another, especially French from any other language; Bonjour! I'm sorry, I don't diFrenchiate well, was that French or Hindi?

Language of origin: French to Denglisch

Frau Boyle, my German teacher, as I recently learned, also speaks French. In fact, she is qualified to teach it. I can't get far past bonjour, but Amisha, who is also in my German class, can: she is another Ab Initio student, and her other language class is French. It was Amisha who told me that Frau Boyle spoke French. I didn't believe her at first; I mean, we already have a French teacher with a German last name, a German teacher from Scotland, and an English teacher who speaks Vietnamese. I asked Frau Boyle if she spoke French, and she said oui, then forgot that I took Spanish and continued in French for a minute or two. Luckily, Amisha was there to help me out. Rather quickly, Frau Boyle realized that she should have been speaking French to Amisha, and she then did just that. They had a conversation in French, then Frau Boyle went back to the front of the room and sat down. Just as Amisha was turning around to talk to me, her mind already back in English mode, Frau Boyle called out one more thing in French. Amisha responded, then continued talking to me. Soon, she commented that it had taken her a while to realize that that last comment had even been in French: she had understood it and come up with something to say in French rather automatically, not internalizing the language used. The way she put it however was, "I didn't differentiate." Maybe it was becaue the topic of French was still on my mind, but I swear she said, "I didn't diFrenchiate." And a new word was born.

Some Fun and Out-of-Context Quotes, Part XVII

I added two new ones today and usually I let them sit for a while before transferring them but I really wanted to put up the next two, and 12 is too many for a single post. Ergo, cue part XVII:

"I don't think linearly, I think in quintic functions."
-Gabe

"There's not enough room in this classroom for my ego."
-Mr. Giromini

"I guessed really hard on that!"
-David on Spanish tests

"Assumption makes an ass out of sump and shun."
-Miss Davey

"I don't know why everything I think of, when I think of something funny, is destructive."
-Mr. Giromini

"It looks like a zebra to me!"
-Moose on the cover of The Stranger

"I wouldn't like that name if I was a person."
-Doug on nicknames

"All I'm saying is what I said."
-Mr. Giromini, responding to a question

"Did someone just fall out the window?"
-Amisha on a loud opening of the window

"I took better notes than the people who paid attention!"
-Gabe on IB History

In a Manner of Speaking...

The point of applying labels to posts is to group them together and allow readers to see all posts related to a specific topic in one place. Many of the labels you can see if you scroll down a bit have been there since the birth of Only At IA, while others appear and disappear as I notice new and/or changing trends. For example, both Mr. Stibitz and Mr. Giromini started making more and more frequent appearances a while back, and now they each have a label dedicated to them. This is happening again. Allow me to explain:

I have a lot of fun finding new ways to talk. I like to invent new ones, steal ideas from other people, whatever, as long as I can find a fun new way to talk. For example, loyal readers will recognize these, and the rest of you can click the links:

-The Verb müst älwäys ät the End öf the Sentence cöme!
-In Soviet Russia, posts label YOU!!
-This is a single self-referential sentence in the midst of a blog post with the purpose of informing the reader of the creation of a new label
-And the word for this in English is "foreshadowing" and it is spelled
f-o-r-e-s-h-a-d-o-w-i-n-g.

So I've decided to make a label to tie them all together. So take advantage of it: go pick a label you find interesting and read some old posts - maybe ones you haven't seen before - and leave me some comments. Really, it's so much more fun for me that way.

:ß

IAtionary: Mit Einem Smiley Face

Mit Ein-em Smi-ley Face [mit ahyn-em SMAHY-lee feys] adv.

1. In a fun, happy or light-hearted manner

Language of Origin: Denglisch

Alternate Spelling: Mit Einem Smileyfäce

In German class a while ago I was talking to Amisha, who sits next to me. I don't remember exactly what happened, but I think we were checking papers or something. I wanted to put an emoticon on hers, and I figured I'd add some German, so I wrote mit einem :). When I went to point it out I realized that I had no idea how to say emoticon...so I went with ,,mit einem Smiley Face." We now say this quite often, wherever one might have inserted a :), had one been on AIM.

YAY! 2000 hits! Thanks guys, you rock!

The Projector Prob-- oh! Oh! OH! Awwww, it missed

As of this year, almost every classroom except Mr. Giromini's has a SMARTboard installed. They also have projectors mounted in the ceiling. As you may know, when a projector is left on and not touched for a while, it changes to its equivalent of a screen saver, which is almost always a logo bouncing around the screen and changing colors. It might look something like this (well the 'bouncing around the screen' part anyway):




For some reason, this absolutely fascinates us IA students. Apparently, there is an episode of House in which the characters watch it for an insanely long time, waiting for it to hit the corner. I don't watch House, so I really have no idea. I do, however, do exactly the same thing. In English class a while ago the screen came on, and I found myself, inevitably, waiting for it to hit the corner. The interesting thing is that one by one, you could sense the attention of the students slipping away. Mrs. Saxsma was talking about something fairly important, (which, for some unknown reason, I cannot seem to remember...) but most of the class had stopped listening and instead devoted their entire attention to the logo, moving tantalizingly around the screen and coming ever so close to the corner but never quite reaching it. I had thought that this fascination was an oddity of mine, but as time passed, students could be seen one by one falling out of the real world and joining all the others moving their heads around and around in a diamond-shaped pattern. After a short time there was hardly a single student still paying attention to what Mrs. Saxsma was saying, only a sea of eyes and heads all following the logo around the screen. I can only imagine how it looked to her, and after a while she realized something was wrong. Just as she was commenting on how the atmosphere in the room seemed somehow off, it came close to hitting the corner. In unison, the class's expectant cries ("oh! Oh! OH!") filled the room, and as one the disappointment was felt and vocalized in groans of frustration. Mrs. Saxsma presently realized what was wrong, reached up, and switched off the projector to protests from the more engrossed students. Then someone had to explain to her and the few students who had escaped the entrancement what had been happening in the last several minutes. I find it very amusing, and I think that this event captures the essence of Only At IA. And the word for this in English is (oh I so love going all Sheikh Darwish on you) "Typical" and it is spelled
t-y-p-i-c-a-l.

A-Hat

Right now in Math HL, we're learning about vectors. I happen to think it's one of our easier units, as we've looked at them in a fair amount of depth before, even if we are adding on to it significantly. One concept that we need to understand is the idea of unit vectors. You see, the purpose of a vector is to convey both a magnitude, which means distance, speed, strength, etc, and a direction. A unit vector, however, only conveys direction, making the magnitude one. For any given vector a (I couldn't find the character a with the arrow, so I'll settle for bold, there exists a vector â that is in the same direction as a, but with a magnitude of one. This has a few important uses, none of which I'm going to go into now. Anyway, when Ms. Hessler first introduced the concept, she said that "â" should be read as "a-hat." Most of the class went along with it, but I, being an individual thinker, had to pause for a moment. A...hat. That just does not sound like something mathematicians would say. It does, however, sound exactly like something that students would say to get around the fancy fluff that math people like to throw in. So I asked, "Is that its actual name, or is it just something that we make up to avoid the real term?" She showed me a page in our textbook (which, for what it's worth, was written specifically for use with the IB programme) which said specifically, "...which is read as 'a-hat.'" I'm still a bit skeptical...my theory: it's actually called "a-caret" or "a-circumflex" or "Littera-circumflexus," but once, shortly after it was named, the person responsible for taking notes at a conference lost their records of the conference, and didn't speak enough Latin to remember the real name. He jotted down the first thing that came to mind, and, as it turns out, no one had been paying enough attention at the conference to prove him wrong.

IAtionary: Bubblephobia

Bub-ble-pho-bia [buhb-uhl-FOH-bee-uh] n.

1. An abnormal fear of filling in bubbles on standardized tests
2. A severe dislike of instructions containing phrases such as "No. 2 pencil," "Erase completely," and "Do not go on until instructed to do so"
3. An annoyance or irritation related to instructors' expecting students to memorize things such as how to calculate the super-period of a coupled harmonic oscillator, but not believing in their ability to remember how to "fill in the bubble completely" from year to year
4. rarely A fear of other objects somehow related to the test-bubble, such as the test mass or the soap bubble

Language of Origin: ACTese to IBan

Some Fun and Out-of-Context Quotes, Part XVI

"You're too French!"
-Mrs. Saxsma after Kanel corrected her pronunciation

"The time-stamp machine ate my homework!"
-Gabe on excuses

"One must be able to laugh at oneself. The only advantage is that I can laugh at you more than I laugh at myself. I mean look at you."
-Mr. Giromini on his IB1 Physics class

"Once I gave someone my mean look and it was a ninth grader and he was like 'Why are you so confused?'"
-Miss Davey

"Sometimes I wish I were in a gangster movie."
-Miss Davey

"Those of you strong in biology, please forgive me for anything I say that is incorrect. Those of you weak in biology, everything I say is correct."
-Mr. Giromini in having to talk about Bio in Physics :-O !

"It thinks I'm a virus!"
-Bridget on this screen

"Seriously I need more coffee."
-Mr. Giromini

"Be...athletic!"
-Amisha on her inability to thing of an appropriate adjective in French

"Break had made you dumb."
-Mr. Giromini on the obvious

You see the time stamp on this post? Get it? If not, think!

Its fun two annoy IA student's with improper, grammar especially apostrophe's

Shakespeare is generally thought to be the greatest writer of all time. Hundred's of year's later, everyone know's his name and most people have seen several of his work's. This is, in part, why I find the following sign (in the English room) to be very funny:


One would think that the maker's of this sign would have taken better care with their apostrophe usage. I mean, thats a pretty obviou's one. But what I find even more Only-at-IA-worthy is that it bothered someone so much that...


For the record, Mrs. Saxsma has no idea who put it th'ere.

In the Loss of Translations

In German a couple of days ago, Frau Boyle handed back a short writing assignment that we had done several days earlier. She was going over some common errors, and she pointed out that we can't just look up a word in the dictionary and thoughtlessly insert it into our sentences. We must consider the part of speech, and look at the word to make sure it has the meaning we intended. She gave us an example or two of when someone had used the wrong word, explaining that in order to figure out what the person had meant she often found herself translating word for word back into English, and a reason for the mistake will usually make itself clear. "For example," she said, walking over to the board, "Once I had a student write this in an essay." She wrote the words Ich will nicht würfel (ich* vill nich*t vü­­­°rfuhl, *ch is either like the Spanish letter j or like English sh, take your pick, °I have no idea how to transliterate the Ümläüt Mönster...be kreativ) on the board, then stepped back so we could see. Ich will nicht is a phrase we know, meaning "I don't want to." But würfel? We'd never seen that before. Frau Boyle explained that this example came to mind because it had really confused her, and it had taken a while to figure it out. She was familiar with the word, but could not understand how it had ended up there; a würfel is a small object used in board games. She had gotten out the dictionary and looked it up, to see if there were any English translations that she hadn't thought of. Bingo! It means 'die,' as in the singular of 'dice.' Appearantly, the student had been trying to say "I don't want to die," and upon looking up "die," found the word for the small cube with sides marked from one to six. Understandable, I suppose, except for the fact that every infinitive verb in German ends in -en, with several exceptions: sein and tun, ending in only -n, and a few others ending in -ern or -eln.

And if you're wondering about the title: I was going to call this post "Lost in Translation," but decided that that had been done and was unoriginal, so I typed "Lost in Translation" into Babel Fish and took it through as many languages as I had the patience for. The most significant changes came through Chinese and Russian, and Greek wasn't bad either. Some other favorites of mine were, "To Transfers the Loss," "Loss of Movement," (thanks there to Japanese,) and "To the Translation Loss" (a shout-out goes to Dutch). In the end, I went with the one I did because I liked how the major words are similar, how it has a meaning, and how that meaning is totally different from the original.

Some Random, Mr. Stibitz-related things

My carpool always arrives at school several minutes early, which is nice because it gives me a few minutes to go to the tech-center-slash-library to see if anyone interesting is there. Harvey is usually there working on something, and there are always a few other people hanging around. Today I was talking to Him (it might have been about the issue I'm having with "aHarvey;" Harveyists say it to each other, but what should we say to Him? I mean we can't tell Him to go "to Harvey" because He's already at Harvey because He is Harvey. In the end, this issue resulted in a decision to stick with the Martian word for "goodbye") when Mr. Stibitz walked in. He said he had a riddle for me: "Today is three-three-oh-nine. When is the next such 'square root day?'" Before I could finish processing the fact that Mr. Stibitz actually had a riddle, Harvey shouted out, "Well, four-four-sixteen! Then five-five-twenty-five, six-six-thirty-six..." Mr. Stibitz said that since I had failed to answer the riddle, I was disqualified and lost the contest. I protested, but he had already left.

I'm gonna skip the next part for now- I'll come back to it in a paragraph or two. For now, just know that this paragraph ends with me in Mr. Stibitz's room.

Later, still in his room, I asked Mr. Stibitz if he really had made up the 'square-root day' thing, or if he had heard it somewhere. It turns out that that somewhere was on the radio, this morning in the car. Someone mentioned it, and he thought, "This would make a good riddle for Josh." And he insisted that I had failed. My argument was twofold: A) Hearing stuff on the radio and making it into a riddle does NOT count, and B) Obviously, God did not mean for me to solve it, so I could not be blamed. I'm sticking to that argument. (For those of you who will get the reference, we just finished Midaq Alley. I guess it's still in my head. The word for this in English is "brainwashing" and it is spelled b-r-a-i-n-w-a-s-h-i-n-g.)

I followed Mr. Stibitz out of his room into the hallway. I had been talking to him for a while when I got distracted by something in the hallway...I can't remember what it was...and when I looked back he had vanished. Fortunately he's taller than the average student in the hallway, and he was wearing a maroon shirt that stood out fairly well, so I found him a few minutes later. This happened a couple more times, and I asked him if he was trying to escapar. He said no, he just had to find Eric. "Could Eric be more interesting than me?" I asked in Spanish. He said something like "Of course not," (with only the slightest hint of sarcasm, but you know with Mr. Stibitz it's hard to be sure) and disappeared again. The next time I found him, he went into the teacher's office, with a victorious, "Watch this" or something along those lines. Hey, I'm doing my best to remember here, no guarantees, remember?

Now back to the second paragraph. My last class of the day is Germän. The German room has five doors: The main door from the hallway, one of those elementary-school-style bathrooms, two storage closets, and one in the wall it shares with Mr. Stibitz's room. That door almost never gets used. Throughout the class, like usual, we could hear sudden random phrases coming from the next room (usually signaling his having realized the extent of his current tangent, and deciding to get back on task). I decided that after class, since I had to stay after school anyway, I would pop into his room, using the mysterious, rarely-used door, to see what was up. I did so, and he was standing by the main door looking out at his departing students. Perfect! I thought. He'll turn around and wonder how I got here! As it turned out, he figured it out in about three seconds- there's only one other entrance, (or so I thought...read on) and I didn't close the door all the way. Dang. So there I was all impressed with my finding a new way into Mr. Stibitz's room - I had thought myself quite clever for thinking to take the back way - and he went and figured it out. To top it all off, just as I was having the realization that maybe the idea might not have been quite Nobel prize-worthy, the window opened and two freshpeople whom I didn't recognize climbed in from outside. Apparently, they had asked if they could leave through the window at the end of class, but Mr. Stibitz had said no, so they satisfied themselves with coming in the window instead. That was it, I was defeated.

IAtionary: Ponerse

Pon-er-se [pohn-EHR-seh; pohn-EHR-say] v.

1. To prove oneself to be superior to another in some specific way
2. To pwn; How'd you do on the test? 87%. Oh really? I got 88%! Ponerse!
3. Literally: To put on; to put oneself

Language of Origin: Espanglés to Sibbian

In freshperson year, Sibby (who was in my Spanish class) was convinced that the verb ponerse meant to pwn. He was continually inserting it into his sentences where pwn(d) should have gone. (See example sentence, above.) Every time he did it, I imagined someone saying the actual meaning of the word in its place: I got 88%! To put oneself!