On Thursday, I awoke with a headache. Looking around, all I could see was water. It appears my Nemesis had the upper hand and successfully captured me. Luckily I was able to make my way back to land, find my group and made it home. I will try harder next year to capture my Nemesis, wherever it may be.
Today at the butterfly reserve, I nearly was captured by my Nemesis. Fortunately, I evaded at the last minute with the help of my secret weapon. While looking at the butterflies, I noticed the one below, staring at me. I walked closer and it flew away, and before my eyes was my Nemesis. I quickly ran out of the floating room, where all the butterflies were, and had Cody drop a spike trap. My Nemesis was trapped, or so I believed. He threw a smoke ball and disappeared, hopefully never to be seen again. After Cody and I exchanged our epic handshake, we turned our attention back to the butterflies.
With the start of April in full swing, and April Fool's day today, Cody, Nelson and I have swiped some precious belongings from the other crew members. We shall see how they react and let you know.
Started developing poisonous chocolate, but decided to make salted peanut butter chocolate to eat for myself instead. Will have to find something else...
We took a nice stroll on the volcano yesterday. It was a rather pleasant, relaxing time. I visited my local contact, as shown below, and he gave me information about my Nemesis. Today we are visiting a chocolate museum to learn how to make chocolate, which I will use to my advantage. Word has it, my Nemisis loves chocolate.
This year's model to fight my Nemesis. Pros: very bitey, small, cleans up after itself. Cons: needs to be put on trees, hard to handle, need to lure Nemesis to it. We are going to the volcano Mombacho today, so I will investigate other possible weaponized animals.
It appears my nemesis is here, taunting me. As we were preparing for breakfast and I was enjoying a nice conversation with George, who works for the Hotel D'Lido, there was an earthquake. It lasted just shy of 5 seconds, but I know it was a sign from my Nemesis and now I know I must move quick to mobilize the troops.
We have arrived in Nicaragua, again. This year I am hoping that our internet is better than last year's and I can fully transmit these messages. I'm not sure what my mission will be this year, but I'm sure it will be just as devastating as the machine-gun-crabs from two years ago. More to come in the morning.
AH!!! There's so much to do still! I'm really excited about the trip and I'm glad it's finally happening. We leave Thursday morning at 6:40am and will be in Nicaragua around noon. I'm excited to see the country again and hope the students have a great time. I have a few secrets in store for the group, so that will be fun. I'm also happy to be working with La Esperanza again as we repaint a school and do small building projects.
Soon all the seniors are going to be posting on their blogs about what they plan on doing after high school. For me, I am asked all the time "did you really want to be a teacher when you went to college?" I always say "Yes!" and tell them I decided back when I was a senior in high school. I knew I wanted to stay in an education setting, but at the time wasn't sure if I wanted to teach math or art. I settled on math mainly (at the time) because I wanted to have a secure job, and decided art would be harder to find.
Fortunately, I liked math in high school, but ended up loving it in college. The first math class I remember truly loving was non-euclidean geometry, with all of it's inherent 'brokenness' compared to 'normal' math. The major take-away from the course was the fact that math truly does not have a single 'right' or 'wrong' answer and can be as subjective as any other subject. In the class, we made triangles out of curved lines, angles that visually had clear 'space' but took up 0 degrees, and made polygons that had angle sums of 0.
All of this is possible once you change the notion of what it means for lines to be 'parallel' or even what you consider a line. Later in other classes we started talking about how easy infinity is to take for granted, yet how crazy infinity really is, in addition to things being infinitely small, yet not zero or some infinities being bigger than other infinities.
Therefore, when I decided I wanted to be a math teacher, I knew I wanted to share this insight with students who otherwise would never be exposed to things like this (since they are not part of a normal math curriculum). I also want to demonstrate to students that math isn't only a set of rules that numbers play by, but a set of rules that we create. It is just as imaginative as anything else, as long as you are open to it. Some days I don't quite succeed in this, but my hope is overall my students leave Key with an appreciation of math in addition to other classes they naturally like.