Tag: word search

And now I’m blind

On By Luther M. SilerIn TeachingLeave a comment

I was not expecting that word search to be nearly as difficult as it turned out to be. No one came close to finishing it, or even finishing half of it, although a couple of my more obsessive kids told me they were taking it home over break and would bring it back on Monday, and I started poking at it myself around noon and as of right now, at 8:30, after putting another hour or so into it, I’m still missing 37 names. This generator does this absolutely wicked thing where they like to make clusters that are almost names but off by a letter or two, or let you spell a name if you make a right turn somewhere, and … damn. I’ve never in my life quit a word search because it was too hard, and this one won’t break me, but it’s coming close.

Just in case you’re bored

On By Luther M. SilerIn TeachingLeave a comment

A game I enjoy playing every year: on one of the three days before longer breaks (Spring, Thanksgiving, Winter) I hand the kids a word search called Famous Mathematicians. It’s their names. I usually do a few of them and split the classes up or sort of randomly spread them around, and this year I decided to pack everyone’s names into one 35×35 grid. There are 119 student names on that grid, and yes, some of them are backwards.

Ordinarily I don’t use anyone’s real names on the blog, but I don’t intend to provide you with a key, which means some of these names are absolutely not going to be uncovered, and I figure finding out that out of my 119 8th graders, one of them is William and another is Sarah is probably not actually any real breach of confidentiality, especially when they’re all embedded in an image and not actually in searchable text. (The “Sara” in the bottom row is an accident! I do not have a Sara.)

At any rate, I can’t come up with any way this could bite me in the ass, so if you’re really bored over the long weekend I hope you have coming, feel free to print this out and see if you can find 119 human-sounding names in there. If I come up with a way this could cause me trouble, I’ll throw the post behind a password, but I don’t think it’s too likely.

(My bank password’s in there too, just for the hell of it.)

(That’s not true.)

(… or is it?)