jittery, from the road

sbux is our new office on the road. we usually stop at one part way through the day, or when we've reached a point in our day where we've exhausted our research and the locations we want to hit and need a moment to recharge, cool off and, most importantly, spend some time outside of the truck.

we both agree, and the Boss figured when we left, that the hardest part of this trip will be the time spent driving.

.. and we've spent a lot of time driving; on average 400 km/day.

We figured that out on this morning's two hour drive/math refresher course. (I'll get to that in a moment.)

Just as we haven't spent longer than one night in the same hotel (save for one set of nights), we haven't made one sbuxs our local brew hut either. However, there's one in every major city and, quite often, one at every major intersection. They all serve basically the same things. Some people do different things, but over all it's the same. I've learned that they have the right things to make a dairy-free, soy-free smoothie. It's not on the menu, but when you're as versed as I am with the ingredients of all the smoothies, and there's a creative person working on the beverages, we can come up with something.

The first dude .. (man I wish there was a story developing here, but there doesn't seem to be. I was going to write about the math review that Sweet and I had going down I40. He wanted to use a calculator to figure out our daily average, I said we should use our heads, or at the very least a pad of paper and he couldn't understand why. Turns out it was because he'd forgotten how to use long division. After a few minutes I had him convinced that I thought he couldn't do it, which was the tipping point to put his pen point to the paper.)

[I know; nice alliteration, right?]

(we worked on a small problem, which he got right. we learned how to check our work and then he went to work on the problem at hand. It was an honour to see him light up with the answer he got, especially after looking over after a couple of minutes to find a confused look on his face because he couldn't figure out why 8x4=34, but 8x7=56.)
<<It doesn't compute he said, and I can't figure out why>>

(Eventually he got it, the right answer and a flood of other thoughts about teaching styles and learning habits. It was refreshing to hear someone talk about all this with such interest and passion, but without the cliche buzz words that practicing teachers find themselves using among other practicing teachers.)

(Road trips make great think tanks, it's unfortunate that it takes a week to get warmed up to it)

.. something about making a smoothie that isn't interesting anymore and wasn't interesting in the first place. Thanks for reading.

8x4=32