Grades, Names, and Percentiles

Our ornaments from Corning Glass arrived by UPS on Tuesday!

This week has been a bit zany for me. Yesterday I found myself rather overwhelmed as I was trying to homeschool my three kids, grade umpteen exams, do the house work, etc. I looked at the sink overflowing with dirty dishes from Wednesday and wanted to scream because I felt like I had so many things to do and didn't know which order to do them in. I've been grading every spare minute of the day from the moment I got up in the morning until I went to bed. Plus some students were not happy with me. Two students actually threatened me they were so angry that I had taken away points (according to the policy in my syllabus) because they had been texting in class or shopping online on a laptop. Most of the students calmed down and said something to the effect that they would learn from their mistake. I got a nice email from another student which helped to compensate for the unhappy ones I got. She said, "you can really tell that you care about your students. It was a pleasure having you as a

professor." That made my day! The wonderful news is that at 12:30pm today I finished grading the exams, and later this afternoon I submitted the course grades for the Registrar. I also got caught up on emailing students.

Although the semester is over it doesn't mean I am done doing work for the university. I have two conference proposals to write (hoping to speak at the NAEYC conference in DC or the NCSS conference in Chicago in November 2018), and I also want to write my syllabi and lesson plans for the spring semester, but I have two months to accomplish those tasks so I don't need to work at such a feverish pace. Although I love teaching at the university, there have certainly been many moments this semester when I thought I had bitten off far more than I could chew to try to homeschool three kids, work a FT job, and keep up with the laundry, Christmas shopping, cooking, cleaning, etc. But we have made it through. I am exhausted, but I have survived. Oliver has been gipped with his schoolwork. I want to give my Kindergartener a lot more

attention in the coming weeks. I don't think he minds that he had more time to play, ha ha!

I also need to put some time into cleaning the house - those types of cleaning jobs you don't do every week like cleaning the shelves of the refrigerator, dusting the tops of the kitchen cabinets, etc. I had planned to do a major cleaning in August when I thought my three kids would be at Good News Camp all day, but plans changed and that didn't happen, and I certainly haven't been doing anything extra as far as cleaning the past four months. On Thursday I got around to paying a few bills (time share, dentist, etc.), but I found out today when I called the library to register my kids for the Christmas party that I missed the deadline. Oops. Sometimes with all I have been juggling I have dropped a few balls along the way.

Over the years as an educator I would have classes where there were multiple students with the same name. For example, in my 8:00 class this semester I have three students with the name

Abby. One of those three has the last name that starts with the letters Ng. I found out last week that BOTH of those letters are silent in her name. Her father is Vietnamese. I never say their last names out loud, but I had always assumed another student's last name was pronounced Smith even though it's spelled Smyth. Turns out the "y" makes a long I sound in her name, which actually is very phonetic. In my 12:30 class this semester I had two students named Emily and three named Hailey. In my 9:30 class I had two students named Ashley and

two named Victoria. One of my goals when picking kids' names was to pick ones that were NOT too popular. I have been hearing the name Oliver a lot more often the last couple of years and so I looked online and sure enough that name has been skyrocketing in popularity. It went from being the 305th most popular boy name in 2000 and has been climbing up ever since. When we picked it in 2012 we knew it was the 78th most popular name in 2011. That didn't seem overly popular to me, but in 2013 it was 52nd, in 2014 it was 32nd, in 2015 it was 19th, and

last year it was the 12th most popular name, and my guess is that it might be in the top ten in 2017. Oops! Well when you're picking a name it's difficult to predict which names will be popular in the future.

The funny thing is that although I hear the name Oliver far more often when we're out and about, I don't think Oliver has had another Oliver in any of his classes or teams thus far, whereas Ian has had that happen multiple times. It happened the first week of his life as he was one of multiple Ians in the NICU. However, Ian actually has stayed more steady in terms of popularity. From 2006-2016 it was somewhere between 72nd and 80th place each year. I am confident we succeeded with Nadia in not picking an overly popular name as only one time was there another Nadia in her class (it was gymnastics), and we've only met a handful of other Nadias over the past nine years. From 2000-2016 the highest her name reached was #178 (in 2005) to a low of #358 (in 2016). One of my students is married, and his wife is due to have a baby in May. He showed

us the ultrasound picture after they found out they are having a boy. I remember how exciting that time was for me with each of our three children even though we had difficulty in finding names we both liked.

This week the 2017-18  basketball season began for our kids. Ian and Oliver had their first practices last night, and Nadia had her first practice this evening. The boys and I went to a Christmas service at church this evening while she was playing basketball. Next Friday she'll miss part of her practice as the kids' choir is singing in a program next Friday night at church.

In addition to homeschooling and grading for the university today, I also took Nadia and Ian to their art class at Meadowbrook and then the four of us went to the library and Pediatrician. Nadia had her 9 year old well visit (albeit she'll turn 9 1/2 in 9 days), and Ian had his 8 year old well visit. At Nadia's three year check-up, she weighed 34lbs (80th percentile) and was 36 inches tall (26th percentile). On October 12,

2012, she was 40lbs (75th percentile) and 40 inches tall (39th percentile), on November 8, 2013 she was 47 lbs (80th percentile) and 42.5 inches tall (30th percentile). Those three years they said something to me each time about Nadia's BMI, but in 2014 she didn't say anything because Nadia weighed 50 lbs (55th percentile) and her height at 46 inches was at the 45th percentile.  In 2015 Nadia weighed in at 58 lbs (70th percentile) and was 1/4 inch shy of 4 ft tall (30th percentile). The doctor said she was just shy of being labeled overweight in terms of her BMI. Last year she weighed 68 pounds (75th percentile) and her height was 51 inches (45th percentile). Today she weighed 74 pounds (65th percentile) and her height was 52 inches (30th percentile). Last year and this year her BMI was at the 82nd percentile, and this particular pediatrician is fine with anything up to 85 percentile for BMI so he didn't say anything about her weight. 

Ian weighed 32 pounds in December 2012, 35 pounds in 2013, 39 pounds in 2014 (45th percentile), 41 pounds in 2015 (20th percentile), 48 pounds last year (25th percentile) and 51 pounds today (25th percentile). He was 36 inches tall in 2012, 39 inches in 2013, 41 inches in 2014 (12th percentile), 44.5 inches in 2015 (30th percentile), 46.5 inches last year (25th percentile), and 48.5 inches today (24th percentile). For a few years I was told Ian needed to gain weight because his BMI was too low, but last year and this year his height and weight have been almost identical in terms of percentile so they are very happy with his BMI (which was at the 34th percentile today and 50th percentile last year). I'm very thankful that the kids are healthy and the only time we usually visit the Pediatrician is for their annual well visits!

Christmas around the world at the Children's Museum on Wednesday morning