thnik again!

My son Jan Thomas just had his fourth birthday. He has found out that it would be nice if he could read. He can read a bit already which has proved very practical. When he and his younger brother watches Thomas The Tank Engine he presses the Yes button to the question if the avi file should be repaired and, after twenty seconds, they can enjoy the next episode.

There is a problem though. He would like to learn to read in three languages. His mother’s Spanish, his father’s Norwegian, and his school’s English. On the market the other day we bought an English alphabet jigsaw puzzle set. The letter ‘a’ has a drawing of an apple, and the challenge is to find the pieces and join them. The problem is that apple in Spanish (‘manzana’) doesn’t start with an ‘a’, neither does the Norwegian ‘eple’.

Today we have tried to make an alphabet list for the three languages. This is what we have found.

English – Spanish – Norwegian
boat – barco – båt
hero – heroe – helt
elephant – elefante – elefant
jungle – jungla – jungel
lion – leon – løve
new – nuevo – ny
pear – pera – pære
rat – rata – rotte
sun – sol – sol
train – tren – tog

There are 16 letters missing. Can you help?

If your Norwegian is lacking, do English and Spanish, or English and French, or Italian, …

I am lettering on you so don’t letter me down.

College isn’t the place to go for ideas. – Helen Keller

White House Begins Campaign to Promote Science and Math Education.

…

“You know the success we seek is not going to be attained by government alone,” Mr. Obama said kicking off the initiatives. “It depends on the dedication of students and parents, and the commitment of private citizens, organizations and companies. It depends on all of us.”- Read more

It is said that it takes an entire village to educate a child. Some feel that the teacher is the most important factor:

… some education experts said the initiatives did little to address some core issues: improving the quality of teachers and the curriculum.

“I think a lot of this is good, but it is missing more than half of what needs to be done,” said Mark S. Schneider, a vice president at the American Institutes for Research, a nonprofit research organization in Washington. “It has nothing to do with the day-to-day teaching,” said Dr. Schneider…

Play Decimal Darts here. It may teach you one or two things about decimal numbers.

The game was created by Albert Bradley Bennett Jr. Read about him here.

- Is that your new car?
- You like it?!
- Yes, I would like to have a car like that.
- But there is a problem with the tires.
- Do they explode when you sing?
- I have five tires. A front tire will last 29,000 miles while if placed in the rear it will last only 21,000 miles.
- How do you know?
- So the question is, if I rotate the tires as best as I can, how many miles can I drive?
- Where do you plan on going?

Problem source: Dan’s problems.

Between two evils, I always pick the one I never tried before. – Mae West

- Four digits are added and the same four are multiplied.
- I bet the multiplication gave a much bigger result!
- No, that is what was strange, the result was the same.
- What were the four digits.
- I am afraid I don’t remember.
- Were they four zeroes?
- No. That I would have remembered.

Answers are not obtained by putting the wrong question and thereby begging the real one. –  Felix Frankfurter

- My girl friend grew the tree above the other day.
- Is it really a tree?
- May be I misunderstood.
- That has happened to me too.
- She said that 2ⁿ – (-1)ⁿ is divisible by three and always odd.
- That is odd, my girl friend never talks to me like that.

You must learn from the mistakes of others. You can’t possibly live long enough to make them all yourself. – Sam Levenson