A Funny Geocaching Story

[+Little Hiawatha]

I have 32 wonderful sixth grade astronomy students. Over the summer I established a Geocache and named it, naturally enough, “6th Grade Astronomy 2013”. Next I bought 32 of “The Year of The Snake” Geocoins, 24 in bronze and 8 in nickel. The 24 bronze coins I activated and named each one for one of the 24 people who have visited the Moon. The 8 nickel coins I named for 8 remarkable space travelers who never went to the Moon.

 

I then logged all 32 coins as “visited” for the “6th Grade Astronomy 2013” cache. On the first day of class I showed my students a duplicate cache and said, “I hid something just like this a short walk form your school. The first student to find it and sign the logbook gets a reward.” Just as I expected one of the kids asked, “But how are we expected to find it if you don’t tell us where it is?”

 

“Good question” I replied and I handed each of them one of the Geocoins and said, “The object you are holding contains the clue to find the cache. This is the only instruction you’ll receive.” I’ll admit I was pretty proud of myself. I thought it was a cool project. I wasn’t expecting what happened next. One of the girls razed her hand and and said, “But I’ve already found the cache.”

 

Little Hiawatha

[+Ms.Scrabbler]

[Clan Riffster]

Awesome!

[Jayme H]

Cute story. Thanks for sharing!

[+stijnhommes]

Did she get the reward, or did you give the rest of the class a chance to find it as well?

[vagabond]

I take it your a teacher??

[+NanCycle]

I take it your a teacher??

 

Good one. Is this in response to the teacher's spelling errors? Do you want the teacher to correct yours? (I assume you misspelled "you're" on purpose.) I think teacher relies too much on spellcheck.

[+Little Hiawatha]

I take it your a teacher??

 

I’m dyslexic. It’s something I’ve struggled with my entire life. In fact it very nearly destroyed my life. I can’t begin to count the number of times that I’ve suffered insults and put downs both intentional and unintentional. I know that the slights and snide remarks will continue as long as I live.

 

However there is one thing that continues to puzzle me and perhaps you can help me understand. Why is it considered poor form to make fun of a person in a wheelchair, or someone with cleft lip, but a person with dyslexia is open game? Why is it that there is compassion for one sort of disability but not for another? Do you think I asked to have a learning disability? I can assure you I did not. It has greatly reduced the quality of my life. I’m not being facetious, I’d really like to know.

[+LashRash]

I think it would be awesome to have a student raise a hand and say "I ALREADY FOUND IT!" I'm a youth pastor and most of my kids don't have a clue what it is even though I talk about it all the time. My little brother is the exception because I take him as often as we can break away for some caching time.

[+mom2sage]

Cool project!

[+Crow-T-Robot]

I take it your a teacher??

 

I'm dyslexic. It's something I've struggled with my entire life. In fact it very nearly destroyed my life. I can't begin to count the number of times that I've suffered insults and put downs both intentional and unintentional. I know that the slights and snide remarks will continue as long as I live.

 

However there is one thing that continues to puzzle me and perhaps you can help me understand. Why is it considered poor form to make fun of a person in a wheelchair, or someone with cleft lip, but a person with dyslexia is open game? Why is it that there is compassion for one sort of disability but not for another? Do you think I asked to have a learning disability? I can assure you I did not. It has greatly reduced the quality of my life. I'm not being facetious, I'd really like to know.

 

I wouldn't make fun of someone with dyslexia but you can't know that someone has it just because they spelled things wrong or typed words out of order on the internet. There are plenty of people who struggle with spelling and grammar posting things on forums. So, I don't think anyone is going around, hoping to hammer on someone who is dyslexic. As you said, you didn't ask for that hardship and it's not ok for anyone to ridicule you for it.

 

Of course, I'm not sure why anyone feels the need to point out others spelling/grammar errors, either. As long as it doesn't devolve into text speak, I can live with typo's and weird sentence structure and understand what was being said.

[Colorado Bear]

Little Hiawatha;

 

Come back on topic; this is an interesting story, and the flaming from others is distracting.

 

The young girl that had already found it did you give her something special? What? How many other of your student have found it, and how?

[+OZ2CPU]

ha ha soo cool.. newer underestimate how smart kids are, or how much they see just by walking the street..

their mind is made to educate them, by investigating anything out of the ordenary,

kids are perfect cache finders..

[BRTango]

I love this story

 

I've introduced my sons Cub Scout Pack to geocaching on our hikes... but something like this would be awesome as well. Thanks for the idea.

 

Like others, I'm curious, did you give her something special?

[+Mudfrog]

this is cool! I hope to see more details posted on what the rest of the astronomy class come up with.

[+Little Hiawatha]

The Geocache itself I bought on eBay and it was beautifully constructed out of a small cider log with a hidden compartment inside and a magnetic lid. It’s a small work of art and blends in nicely in park like settings. Although just large enough to hold a film canister I was able to place a little geocoin shaped like a pencil inside just before going to class. So on hearing that the cache had already been found I changed the rules a bit. I said the student who brought me the pencil geocoin would get the reward.

 

There was quite a rush of students to find it after school but the same girl who had found it before brought me the pencil tracker. As it turned out almost every student in the class signed the log. I traded the small pencil geocoin for a full sized “Pi” tracker which is a gorgeous coin. It has the Greek letter for “Pi” on one side along with March 14 which is “Pi Day” or “Pie Day”, the day when you are suppose to eat pie. The other side has the number Pi running around the circumference and the equation of how to find the circumference of a circle using Pi. The geocoin provided a spring board for a conversation as many of the kids didn’t know about “Pie Day”.

 

P.S. Some of the people who logged the find said they were surprised that I didn’t hide the cache about a block away near the statues of Yoda and Indiana Jones or that they found the cache on their way to see Indy and Yoda. What are those two cultural Icons doing in a park in northern California? It seems that some guy named George Lucas lives near by.

Edited September 27, 2013 by Little Hiawatha

[+dprovan]

I take it your a teacher??

I’m dyslexic.

Not to minimize your point, but remember that the original comment was excessively vague, not an explicit insult. It could and was taken as a comment on errors in the OP, but we can choose to imagine that it's something else. I finally found an error in the OP, which doesn't appear to have anything to do with dyslexia, but the error in the comment is glaring.

 

By the way, I really enjoyed your story.

[+popawalker]

That's such a cool story. Keep up the good work Little Hiawatha.