Friday, January 25, 2008

Blind Ambition

I had an interesting chat with one of my sophomore students yesterday.

It seems that she can't WAIT to be a Senior, so she can take those great Senior math classes.

Since this is not a student for whom math comes easily, I was curious. "Really? Which classes did you mean?"

"Oh, you know. Calculator and Pre-Calculator".

Thursday, January 17, 2008

Roll-off

Half way. I can hardly believe it.
18 down. 18 to go.

My physics classes are studying rotational motion. Some of my students think I have made this up, personally, just to torture them...

Today, we had a "moment of inertia roll-off competition".

Students were told to bring "something round". Their only instructions were that it was supposed to roll in a straight line and that they had to be able to carry it into class in one hand (no tractor tires allowed). We set up tables as ramps, put up a tournament bracket spreadsheet on the computer projector and we were...ahem...off to the races.

We had the candle and the marble.




We had the pencil and the tennis ball





There was the highly competitive golf ball and oil-and-water-in-a-bottle




But nothing in my teacher training courses had prepared me for...

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The Sausage.