Damped and Driven

One thing thats great about being a teacher is that the kids are funny, or maybe more accurately, when kids are involved, things can be funny, actually f’in hillarious. Case in point: we’ve been working on waves last couple days. I had them do a short project where they were supposed to make a poster with the two kinds of waves that we talked about (transverse and longitudinal) on it. The poster was supposed to have definitions, diagrams, and examples from the web. The examples is where it got interesting.

One of my students had searched for ‘transverse’. And was looking at a picture she had found and said something like “gross, ewww..”- naturally i was intrigued. I went over and saw what looked like the inside of something, nay someone and thought uh-oh. What are the students looking at on my watch? I scanned the URL and the word ‘colonoscopy’ grabbed my attention, yikes! Turns out she had stumbled on a ‘tranverse’ image from a colonoscopy. I didn’t draw attention to it or tell her what it was (the inside of a butt) but told her to go back and did my best to quell totally busting out laughing. Apparently, transverse is also an anatomical word. Its more or less the plane that would go through your waist parallel with the floor (i never took anatomy), and i guess that was the orientation of the image. You learn something new every day.