My dear Aunt Sally

Imagine: Kansas City Library Central Library parking structure.

When teaching math or science, it is always helpful to have mnemonics. They are wonderful little tools that last a lifetime!!

I grew up knowing that any smart student would "please excuse my dear Aunt Sally". I never knew what my dear Aunt Sally did... but it must have been a doozy. Everyone in my class knew to excuse her. But the funny thing is my school (an Argentine school) taught math in both English and Spanish and we never learned the Spanish mnemonic for the math operations...  I wonder if there was one?

Parenthesis, exponents, multiply, divide, add, subtract - from left to right, in order of operation. Miss Cleary did not let us proceed to any adding or subtracting until we had cleared out all the multiplying and dividing. She was one tough teacher. I loved spanish math much better, though. You did everything in your head. Dividing was written out exactly backwards than the english version... and you did any remainder subtraction in your head, never showing your work. I always thought of it as being less demonstrative, more internal. It was the same as internalizing your thoughts, but here you were internalizing your math.

When I started teaching bilingual Algebra, none of my students had met my dear Aunt Sally. The day I introduced this mnemonic to them, several of them stared at the classroom door as if Aunt Sally would dramatically enter, her chiffon robes flowing and her perfume encasing us all. I had a terrible time keeping my students' attention. It would have been worth having the principal's secretary sweep into the classroom...

But once the students caught on to these four/six english words as the math order of operations, they laughed and bounced in their desk seats. They suddenly OWNED the order of operations!!! They knew Aunt Sally and would never forget her.

If their classmate did not grasp the vision, they helped. The students grew animated and insistent that math problems were solved by 'please excusing my dear Aunt Sally'. The students invented their own game: they asked me for the hardest math problem I could think that included all six operations in any order. Each student had the same problem. Each student would solve the first step, pass their paper to their left, and do the next step - and pass the paper to the left. That meant if your seatmate did the wrong operation, you explained it to him/her and corrected it. These kids love being right!


My students challenged me to any other mnemonics I knew. My brain went blank. All I could remember were science related ones.
King Phillip cried out for green spinach (Kingdom, phylum, class, order, family, genus, species).
My very educated mother just served us new potatoes (Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Neptune, Pluto). Oh, wait - Pluto is gone. Sigh... How about this:  My very educated mother just served us nachos??

You can reach a student's imagination just using your own.

Mistaken identity

Christmas time is when we send and receive photo cards with our 'old' classmates. Since E and I grew up worlds apart, I am always asking him "was this your college roomate?" or "did you two go to high school together?". He asks the same of my friends' cards and photos. "Who is this? I can't keep them all straight!"

Almost all these friends with whom I still communicate are college chums. Only one is from high school days. She was my best friend in high school even though we were practically opposites. She was the oldest of a huge family, I was the younger of two children. She lived across from the high school and participated in everything; we lived on the outskirts of town and I rarely attended extracurricular activities. Her dad was very active in her church's Knights of Columbus.  My dad worked mostly out of town. Her dad was always heading up some fund raiser. My dad was only home a few months my senior year, and when he was home, he worked. She worked at the Ben Franklin store after school. I worked at the county library. She had a date in high school. I never did. She was very outgoing, I was very very shy. I thought we were a lot alike.

So when we got our Senior yearbooks and  passed them around for friends to sign, she was the only person to sign mine. I stood in line to sign hers.

I didn't mind that only ONE person signed my yearbook - it was photos that I liked. Besides, everyone always writes the little lies about how much they enjoyed you in their class, how they wish you luck, and how you should keep in touch forever.

She wrote a whole page in my yearbook. She wrote that I was an ice maiden and stuck up, the weirdest person in our class. She wrote that I didn't fit in at high school and that she wished me luck fitting in at college. She wrote that I was misfit and suggested I move back to California where I'd be accepted. She thought we were incredibly different.

I read this in awe. I put the yearbook away and didn't even look at the photos. But every once in awhile I'd pull it off the shelf and re-read her writing. Finally, one day, I tore that page out and threw it away. I had enough of it.

I wasn't any of the things she wrote. I was shy. I wasn't stuck up, I was scared to death. I wasn't weird, I just didn't know who to ask about fitting in. I wasn't the person she wrote about, I was an insecure child who built her world around making good grades and reading everything I could get my hands on. I wasn't staying away from activities - I lacked a way/ride to the events. I wasn't an ice maiden, I was a warm human being with volumes of diaries, with hopes and dreams. I was a teenager, trying.

I got over her rant in time. I never told anyone about it. When E asked me who the photo card was of a lady with three kids, I told him. "My best friend from high school."

I think it was just a case of mistaken identity. She didn't know me. And she still doesn't. But I get a delightful photo of her each year and a letter listing the achievements of her husband and her kids. I send her photos of our dogs. She probably mistakes one of them for me.

Mistaken identity continues throughout all our lives. People think we are who we aren't. Or don't give us credit for the person we are.


Seldom, very seldom, does complete truth belong to any human disclosure; seldom can it happen that something is not a little disguised, or a little mistaken. - Jane Austen