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Someone to Have on Your Speechwriting Team
I’m recuperating tonight from two and a half days of subbing in a fourth-grade classroom. There were some struggles, but it mostly went well. There were lots of vivid moments that are satisfying to remember. For example, the students were assigned to take a position on an issue from an argument feature of Scholastic News, then give reasons to back up their claim. They completed this in teams, and voted on one team member to go up to the front and present their conclusions. (It was cute to see one team that kept raising their hands. I’d go over there, and then realize that they were just voting.) The kids elected to speak did a great job, for the most part standing up straight, looking at the audience, and speaking in complete sentences.
One reserved little girl gave an unexpected argument in defense of keeping the penny that charmed the socks off me. I asked her if she had seen it in the Scholastic issue, since the “for” and “against” items are written by kids. Nope, it was her own, she corrected me in her quiet way. See, Ricochet members, if we get rid of the penny, we are losing out, because finding a penny is good luck. We won’t have these serendipitous discoveries anymore if we coldheartedly pull these one-cent pieces out of circulation. So put that in your pipe and smoke it.
I told her that I loved her argument. Not because it was logical, but because it was poetic. I didn’t expect it, and it got me thinking about how it appealed to a different side of me–it appealed to my feelings. It changed the tenor of the conversation.
Published in Education
Nice OP but I’m guessing that your daughter wrote it. You cannot write this well, can you?
P.S. Shame on you!
Ah, now I see what you’re doing.
Guilty of whatever it is than I am being charged. I throw myself at your feet, begging only for mercy and a turkey sammich.
I like the way she thinks. Reminds me that when retirement was approaching it was sad to think of no more weekends off of work.
ain’t it so and yes, sad.
But, since the Federal Reserve System was created and inflated away the value of currency, a quarter is worth a cent *. So, let’s make quarter coins similar to current cent coins and move up from there. Then when you find a quarter, it will be good luck.
* We don’t have pennies (pence, although we do have Pence, but that’s another story) in the United States. They are cents, just look what it says on them. A penny is English currency, originally with twelve pence to the shilling and twenty shillings to the pound sterling. Of course, now the Brits have gone decimal, so a pound is a hundred pence and the shilling is five pence. Go figure.
Also, did we do that, we could make the equivalent of a nickel into a $1 coin, the dime-like coin as a $2 coin, the quarter-like coin as a $5 and start printing paper money (not really legal, anyway, but…) at $10 and on up. We might also have a small and inexpensive five-cent coin equivalent to the old ha’penny.
The unique faculty of children to think outside the box, is they have yet to have a box indoctrinated onto them. So you’d find much more creative responses from children than adults.
Canada got rid of the penny, I dont think anything has really changed, we also got rid of $1 and $2 bills replaced by loonies and twonies. (most people spell it toonies, but I think it should be twonies, because its a slang for the two dollar coin)…
One thing to think on – if you get rid of the nickle you’ll also have to get rid of the quarter – because you can’t make change for the quarter without a nickle.
My proposal above included a five-cent coin, but you can just price everything in quarter-dollars. One does not have to make change for a quarter if everything costs, 1, 2, 3, or more quarters.
Yes, but the problem comes from sales taxes. Even if your priced at 18.75 after a 5% sales tax your total will be 19.69…
If you look at the Canadian dollar coins they’re larger than the quarter – twonie, loonie and quarter stacked form a kind of a pyramid with each coin being a few millimeters larger than lesser valued coin. The reason for this, is so that the blind can tell them apart by touch, and thus couldnt be short changed.
So, round to the nearest quarter. It’s what they do with cents now, or nickels in Canada.
They also use ridges or lack of to help the blind. They have also tried eight-sided coins in the past to help distinguish. That’s a separate issue from size of coin versus value.
She is a sweetheart.
What a great story.
It’s a good reason to keep them. 😊
Alternatively, we could send all the Fed governors and staff to Jekyll island, burn the bridges, and set up a guard to prevent escape by land, air, or sea. We could airdrop stale bread once a week or so.
None of them were born when it was started. They may be part of the system, but the system is the problem. We need to change the system back and get back to Constitutional governance:
Nothing about printing money. Coins. That’s it.
Scapegoats. Sometimes hanging a few scapegoats will lead to fixing the fundamental problem.
Well, why stop at the Fed governors, then?
That’s super cute.
The biggest problem with retirement is that you can never tell when you’re on vacation.
I initially read this as “two and a half days of sobbing in a fourth grade classroom.”
That’s what I’d be doing if I had to substitute teach.
My proposal is to slash the federal government by 75%, so that doing away with the penny will become more than a rounding error in terms of cost.
I found a shiny new penny in a parking lot yesterday and said, oh boy, a good luck penny, and picked it up. I wondered if anyone did that anymore. I put it in my purse, not with the other coins – I can always use good luck. Have you ever wandered past a fountain and saw the many coins in it? There you go.
PS Love that you are a teacher and found inspiration as well as gave it!
Which will be rounded up to 19.75 of course. More revenue!
Doesn’t that depend on whether it’s heads or tails?
My wife picks up pennies if they’re the right way up. I never pick them up either way.
got to be heads up. let the other ones lie there to be picked up by the uninformed.
Keep the kids or the penny? By the way, “a penny for your thoughts” is all mine are worth.
It’s not poetic and it doesn’t appeal to emotions. It appeals to tradition and the stories that hold them in place, she’s conservative, she gets the job.
Oh, but I like visiting Jekyll. It’s one of my favorite places. Let’s find somewhere less lovely for the Fed folks.
Hmm. I was trying to find words for why that supporting claim was so powerful to me, and that’s what I came up with. Perhaps you are right. However, it certainly did draw out positive emotions for me.