howardpark/k 12 education

King's Academy is a rigorous and progressive boarding school modeled on Deerfield Academy (of which HM King Abdullah II is an alumnus). If you want to spread tolerance and humanism in the Middle East, you do it with schools, not bombs! (President Bush, please take notes, or at least try.)


This is the school, outside Amman, Jordan, where I will be teaching 9th-grade World History and 10th-grade Middle Eastern History, beginning this fall. I will also be living in the dorms as a faculty advisor. On this map, the dorms are on the far side of campus (around building 22).

As a teacher, I have seen lots of funny exam answers and a few ingenious ones, but this is the funniest, most ingenious one I have ever read:

"Is Hell exothermic (gives off heat) or endothermic (absorbs heat)? Support your answer with a proof." ... (1) If Hell is expanding at a slower rate than the rate at which souls enter Hell, then the temperature and pressure in Hell will increase until all Hell breaks loose. (2) Of course, if Hell is expanding at a rate faster than the increase of souls in Hell, then the temperature and pressure will drop until Hell freezes over. So which is it? If we accept the postulate given to me by Ms. Therese Banyan during my Freshman year, "That it will be a cold night in Hell before I sleep with you," and take into account the fact that I still have not succeeded in that area, then (2) cannot be true, and so Hell is exothermic.