Everyday

They say you learn something new everyday. Since I started teaching, this has definitely been true for me! For example, Thursday we were talking about the explorer Fernando Magellan and how he named the Pacific Ocean because of its calm waters. Several of my students asked me "Why...what does pacific mean?" I honestly no idea so I went to the dictionary and looked up the word pacific. This is what I found: pacific (adjective): tending to make or preserve peace; conciliatory; calm, tranquil. It makes sense...when thinking about a pacifier or a pacifist, but I never knew that pacific was an adjective that you could use to describe!

Here's another: yesterday my kids told me that there is a word googol that means a really big number. So I look in up in the dictionary and sure enough googol means a number that is equal to 1, followed by 100 zeros. Google apparently got its name from this word because of the large amount of information you can get from google.com

And just for fun a picture I took recently, while on the bosphorous.