You're braver than I thought

I work in our nations public schools in a variety of differnt roles. Students of all grade levels and ability levels. Before school, after school, different schools. With other teachers, teaching on my own, small group, large group. Red fish, blue fish. I pretty much see and do it all.

I like to think of myself as an Education Sentinel. You know, darting here and there, righting wrongs, rewarding proper behavior, crushing laziness. Stuff like that.

One of the perks of working in schools is that I get to re-learn a bunch of stuff I had long since forgotten. So the other day I'm working in a 7th grade history class, which was studying Columbus and his journeys. One of the activities we did I found particularlily amazing, and thought I'd share it with you.

In Fourteen hundreed and ninety two,
Columbus sailed the ocean blue.

No, not that.

We were talking about the three ships he took with him on his journey. His smallest ship, the Nina, was 42 feet long, by 14 feet wide. This isn't very large at all. Allow me to demonstrate. Go outside at home or work, and pick an easily noticeable spot. A tree, or your front steps, for example. Then take 14 regular strides (the average stride being about 3 feet). Mark this spot. Go back to the middle of your imaginary line, and take about 2 1/2 steps in both directions, and mark those spots as well. The ship was also 12 feet high, and divided into 3 decks.

Now you've got the rough dimentions of the size of this ship. Not overly big, considering that you and 25 other people need to spend the next 3 months living and working within these boundries, not to mention sail 1/4 of the way around the world. Did I mention that you have no real idea where you're going, since no one has been where you're headed in almost 500 years. No maps, and only as much supplies as you can cram into your ship. Wanna get some sleep? Half of the crew sleeps out on the deck while the other is working around you. Food? Hope you like scurvy.

Pretty amazing that they actually pulled it off, I think. This was one of the most advanced ships of Columbus' time. Consider that nowadays that the U.S.S. Enterprise, an aircraft carrier, is approximatly 510 times as large as the Nina.

Stern stuff, those sailors. Hats off to them. And to sailors today.

2 pts.