Santa shorts

Just yesterday, we were brainstorming December holidays for seasonal research topics: St. Nicholas Day, Dia de la Virgen de Guadalupe, St. Lucia Day, Las Posadas, Hanukkah, Christmas, Kwanzaa, Boxing Day, New Year’s Eve, sometimes Diwali and Eid . . . One child suggested winter as a December holiday. Thus began our discussion of Winter Solstice and the increasing hours of darkness we experience leading up to the solstice. “Is there a place where they have darkness for the whole day?” “What happens at the other end of the Earth?” Well, it’s summer there right now (technically, spring). “Do they celebrate Christmas in a different month?” That’s how I found myself explaining that Santa wears shorts when he visits Australia. “He keeps a pair in his sleigh, and then when he gets to Australia, he changes into his Santa shorts. Sometimes he wears a pair with little reindeer on them, sometimes ones with holly on them.” After a little more discussion of the solstice and the seasons and the tilt of the Earth, a third grader raised her hand. With a twinkle in her eye, she asked, “Which shorts does he wear most often—the ones with the little reindeer or the ones with the holly?” Hmmm.

Our Christmas Eve snow four years ago, combined with their limited life experience and all the “white Christmas” hype in movies, songs, and greeting cards, has my students convinced that it snows on Christmas. I quite confidently told the children that it rarely snows in Houston, that in all my thirty-three years of living in Houston it had only snowed three times. Of course, what should happen the very next day?

Clearly, Ms. S. can’t be trusted.

Sometimes a learning opportunity quite literally falls from the sky. Tossing aside lesson plans to take advantage of such opportunities is one of the joys of teaching. Back in September, as Ike bore down on the Gulf Coast, this meant dropping everything to plot its advancing longitude and latitude and read The Magic School Bus Inside a Hurricane. Today, it means we make 6-pointed snowflakes, experiment with crystals, look at crystals under the microscope, and read Snowflake Bentley, the story of a farmer-scientist whose passion for photographing individual snowflakes began when he was a child
—and it means admitting I was wrong.

What We’re Reading:

The Gift from Saint Nicholas by Dorothea Lachner
Snowflake Bentley by Jacqueline Briggs Martin

XXVIII from Las piedras del cielo (Skystones)

The square in the crystal falls back in its symmetry:

those who open the doors of the earth

will find in the darkness, intact and complete,

the light of that system's transparency.

The salt cube, the triangular

fingers of quartz: the diamond's

linear water: the maze

in the sapphire and its gothic magnificence:

the multiplication of rectangles

in the nut of the amethyst:

all wait for us under the ground:

a whole buried geometry:

the salt's school: the decorum of fire.

—Pablo Neruda