Observations

I (David) have a new student in my sixth grade math class who has just come out of the Spanish school system. He is actually half Australian and half Irish. It has been interesting to learn through him how numbers are written differently in Spain. In the Spanish system, the "." is used to separate groups of thousands where we would normally use a "," and vice versa. Thus, the number one million would be written 1.000.000,00. This has been confusing for him as we first worked with larger numbers and are now working with decimals.

Another difference that sometimes frustrates us is that in Europe, dates are written day/month/year instead of month/day/year that we are used to. For example, my date of birth is Nov 8, 1973, which I have always written 11/8/73, but here it would be 8/11/73. So when you see it written but don't know if the person who wrote it was European or American, it's not easy to tell if they meant Nov 8 or Aug 11.

On a somewhat unrelated note, our headmaster Mr. Musser was asking all of the students where they were born as they came into the school building this morning. I'm not sure why he was asking, but it was interesting to stand and listen to the cities all over the world that were given. In one family, each of the three siblings was born in a different country! We are an American school, but our student body is certainly international.