To Be Determined
issue number three
MathCounts On March 5th, everyone who participates in Gordon’s MathCounts program went to the Rhode Island state competition. Gordon’s official team won sixth place out of about thirty schools. Below is a picture of the trophies they won. Seven people from Gordon were in the top fifty for individual scores, and everyone was in the top one hundred. There were approximately three hundred people at the competition. Gordon school students took tenth place, seventeenth place and twenty-third place, among others. All the participants had a great time and learned a lot. It was a fun experience that will help make the team next year even better. They would like to thank everyone who made it possible including: Mr. Kravitz, Mr. Barrett, and anyone who provided transportation. MathCounts meets twice a week. They get together and do math problems. They also do things in preparation for the competition, like learning the best way to assign problems during the team round. Here are two examples of typical problems:
The spring season of after school athletics began last week
What is the largest integer less than 2010 that has a remainder of 5 when divided by 7, a remainder of 10 when divided by 11, and a remainder of 10 when divided by 13? Here’s a harder one: The measures of the interior angles of a convex hexagon form an increasing arithmetic sequence. How many such sequences are possible if the hexagon is not equiangular and all of the angle degree measures are positive integers less than 150 degrees?
The answers will be published in the next edition of the paper. There are all different types of problems like geometry, arithmetic, algebra, and probability. When somebody thinks they got the answer, they show the rest of the people how they did it and then Mr. Kravitz or Mr. Barrett check to see if it is correct. A lot of fun is had during MathCounts practices. Remember, anyone can go to practices so hopefully they will have lots of people for next year!
Ally Gators The Gordon group of eighth graders called
As a group, we discuss issues around
teachers who come together and talk about
have come up with the idea that we as
the Ally Gators is a group of students and
issues around prejudice, homophobia and basic rights that they feel are not given to everyday humans. The group meets fre-
quently at lunchtime for half an hour.
We have created a mission statement: “The
hatred towards LGBTQQ people, and we students of the eighth grade and teachers
of our Middle School can educate people about equality. Although a few students
started Ally Gators this year, we hope to
keep this group for many years to come.
Gordon School Ally Gators makes it our
Also, we wanted to bring awareness to
all ages to educate ourselves and others in
around the world recognize this day by
mission to create a safe environment for
order to prevent discrimination, homophobia, and promote awareness of people who
identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer or questioning.�
the Day of Silence. Students and teachers staying silent to raise awareness of what
many LGBTQQ people go through every-
day. Many students from Ally Gators will participate in the Day of Silence on April
15, 2011. We hope that other students, even if they are not in Ally Gators, will take part in this serious day.
Gordon Spring Sports Q
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April Fools at School With the hilarious, creative pranks done
by Amy Vogel
After Mr. Hamer informed the class of
it was so funny.” When prompted, she
nicely made lead and lose a tooth, too.
was that I created new food labels for
here at Gordon last Friday, April Fools
this, they took it as a sign to follow Isabel’s
better pranks included the classic TP-ing
When Mr. Hamer caught on, he definitely
chairs, filling certain classrooms up with
thought it was funny and original.” The
Day was a huge success. Some of the
of rooms, emptying certain classrooms of those chairs, hiding expensive instruments, thirteen kids simultaneously losing teeth,
and of course, the always appreciated carstuffed-with-balloons prank.
enjoyed the prank. Says Mr. Hamer: “I
prank was brought to an entertaining end when another student came back to class
and notified everybody that he got a tooth box!
Mrs. Whinery’s advisory had been plan-
One of the more startling April Fools Day
weeks before they finally got to execute
music room, home of the handbells. Thurs-
ning a special surprise for Mr. Wales for it. They had many ideas for this prank,
pranks took place in the Middle School
day morning, three students in the hand-
starting with covering his car with sticky-
bell ensemble questioned Mrs. Hodgin
on them. However, due to poor weather
that night for the family social. When she
notes, all with individual messages written predicted for April 1st, this idea evolved
into the final prank, which was stuffing his car with balloons.
Mr. Wales later commented that this prank
was “a great addition to my otherwise dull first day of April. I’ll be sure to be thinking of all of you during the rest of your time
at Gordon and will be certain to come up with a similarly nice surprise for you be-
fore you graduate!” Good luck, Mr. Wales! Another prank was in Mr. Hamer’s class-
room at around 10am. The prank began as soon as one student reached into her bag and took out a tooth-like piece of white
chocolate with enough raspberry juice on her hand to look like a realistic amount
of blood. She informed Mr. Hamer that
she had lost a tooth, and then walked out of the room to go to the nurse. “I really
thought her tooth was falling out,” said Mr. Hamer. “I was wondering why she
asked to go to the nurse. I was thinking, if you lose a tooth, just get up and go.”
about whether she was going to be present answered that no, she was busy that night, the three girls tried to hide their excitement, knowing that their prank could
actually work. So that night, those three
girls enlisted the help of three other friends present at the family social, and headed over to the music room to get to work.
Working quickly and carefully, making
sure to not break any bells, the six seventh grade girls put every single bell, mallet, and folder that was on the table away.
They then stood back to admire their work,
but decided it wasn’t good enough. So
next, they covered the bell tables with the hand drums, putting the lower sounding
ones where the lowest bells had been, and vice versa with the higher ones. Satisfied, they left the room, leaving only a note
on the whiteboard and one on the music
stand behind, excited to see Mrs. Hodgin’s reaction the next morning.
It turned out to be a good one. She later
commented “I was confused, then I saw the big ‘April Fools!’ sign written on
the board. My jaw dropped when I saw African percussion instruments on the
otherwise empty handbell table. I thought
admitted, “The best prank I ever played my children’s food [ex: Cheerios became Grumpios]. [The handbells prank] was way better!” Another exciting success.
A number of other classrooms affected by this crazy holiday. Most popular was Mr.
Rempis’ room, effectively TP-ed with toilet paper left over from the Minute To Win It
game. Another great example of recycling was Mrs. Kravitz’s room, full of balloons left over from the family social.
Then there was the partnership of both Mrs. Ginn’s room and Mr. Burnstein’s
room. While both rooms had the tables
upside-down, Mrs. Ginn’s room held all of the chairs (un-stacked and scattered) from both of the rooms. This made for an inter-
esting surprise for unsuspecting substitute for Mrs. Ginn, Mr. Ray.
However, Mr. Burnstein’s room experi-
enced more pranking than was originally
planned. Perhaps missing the note left for solely this reason, somebody had turned
the ceiling fan on. Without missing a beat, the fan scattered small pieces with mes-
sages written on them all around the room. This prank, set up by three seventh grad-
ers, with the generous help of Mr. Howard, had been intended for Mrs. Whinery’s class, the class after Mr. Burnstein’s.
This certainly was not the only prank that day that ended up a bit differently than originally planned. Some brought out
the best in people, some, the worst. Some generated laughs, others just drove the
victims of the pranks crazy. Some were
simple and done quickly, while others took
weeks of planning, and while they resulted in hilarity, also required a lot of not-so-fun cleaning up.
Gordon Has A Debate Team? That’s right, it’s finally happened. The Gordon School now has a debate team. Instead of having you read a long, boring article, I’m just going to break it down. Who’s idea was this? Two sixth graders have been meeting with Mr. Karpf every Friday for a good while now getting this team together. What exactly does this debate club involve? The debate club is just a fun activity for kids who like to debate, who have debating skills and want to show them off, or who want to improve or gain debating skills. When is it? It is Thursday at lunch and recess in Ms. Zakin’s classroom. If I show up, am I automatically in the debate club? Am I committed for life now? Obviously not. There will be more trial meetings, April 14th and April 21st. Those are the days for you to come and just see how we operate and what you can expect.
The first meeting of the Gator Debaters
You are in no way committed to come to all three even though we recommend it. Want to come to the first one and then decide not to come back? Fine. Miss the first one, or maybe even the second, but want to check it out at the last minute? Go ahead. What would be debated? All kind of exciting things ranging from sports, politics, music, and just about anything. Who would be teaching this? Mrs. Zakin. Can anyone join? The debate team is for fifth, sixth and seventh grade. If I show up or add my name to a list or something am I automatically in? Probably not. It all depends on how many kids we have. We are planning on taking between five to seven kids per grade, but we may not get that many kids. If we do have more kids that we can take, we will
simply draw names out of a hat. The people who do get their names drawn from the hat will be in it the first semester, then priority will be given to people who have never done it before. Are we going to have real debates? Do we get to debate other schools? Because other schools don’t have debate teams for their middle schoolers, we won’t be debating any other schools. But we try to have a few organized debates after school every two or three weeks, with refreshments like assorted vegetables or cookies. But we will not be doing that in the near future as this is a small thing. We’ll have to wait for it to grow. Do we have a team name? Yes. We are called The Gator Debaters. Okay, I get it. When is this article going to be over? Right now.