And another thing. . .

One of the things that I love about tutoring is the incidental knowledge that I pick up while I'm instructing my students in reading and writing.  The same thing happens with substitute teaching.  Is my student working through a unit on thrill seeking?  Guess what I get to learn about.  Does the high school need a basic geometry teacher?  Guess who's getting a refresher course in interior and exterior angles.  This past semester I have learned a number of things I wouldn't have encountered otherwise:

1. Wilkie Collins wrote the first real detective novel, a book called The Moonstone, which set the pattern for almost every detective novel (or at least English detective novel) since, including anything mentioning Sherlock Holmes.  So when I stumbled across a copy in my parents' basement,  I read it.  Not bad.
2. Blue light is a major factor in human health.  Applied in the right times in the right ways, it can completely reset our internal clocks, for good or for ill.  Electronics are a major source of blue light, particularly because we focus on them so intently, but even the brightest flourescent lamp does not project as much blue light as a cloudy winter day.  Blue light during the day is good.  It forfends depression, soothes aggitated nerves, and keeps people awake.  Blue light at night counteracts all those good things by short circuiting the circadian rhythm, an internal shift that can also lead to diabetes, cancer, and in general a higher mortality rate.  Having struggled with depression, I took notice of this information. 
3. 11 teenagers die every day from accidents related to texting and driving. 
4. Alternate interior angles are always congruent.  Consecutive interior angles are always supplementary.  Coordinating angles are always congruent.  And if you really want to confuse a student, put five different variables inside two pairs of almost parallel lines when all you really want is x, which happens to be in the top right inside corner, and y, which is directly across from it. 
5. Radiocarbon dating is only for rocks with organic matter in them, and the numbers of all rock dating methods rarely come back consistently with each other.  
6. Second-graders can understand scarcity.
7. Seventh-graders do not remember 9/11, but I remember the collapse of the Berlin Wall.  That makes me historical. 

It's fun, learning all these new things and being refreshed in things that I haven't studied since high school.  And then to apply sometimes. I told Seth about the effects of late night blue light, and we switched our alarm clocks (our last was a bright green light) to something dimmer, and the change might be improving our sleep.  (It's too early to tell.)