Wednesday, November 23, 2011

Monday, November 21, 2011

Assignment 13:
Pg. 175: 1-7 (all), 11-27 (odd).

Friday, June 24, 2011

Happy Last Day of School

I hope you all took something away from the PD today. I'd never used the program so sort of found it interesting. Have a great summer!!

Thursday, June 16, 2011

Hint 2 (of 2)

The cubes do not have to share sides. They can touch at corners or not at all. They can't float though.
I will post the partial answer at 8:45.

Wednesday, June 15, 2011

Hint 1 (of 2)

If you have the largest arrangement and you take blocks away from it one by one, it might help find the smallest arrangement.

Tuesday, June 14, 2011

How Many Cubes? (Math Forum Problem #17028)

Something interesting for before the summer hits :)


Here are the front view and side view of some cubes that I arranged.
blocks
Questions:
  1. What is the largest number of cubes that I could have used to make this arrangement?
  2. What is the smallest number of cubes that I could have used to make this arrangement? 
http://mathforum.org/pows/submission-flow.do?execution=e1s1

Monday, June 13, 2011

Summer Vacation

Have a great break. Hopefully teaching summer school (if you're going to) will be as easy as 3.14159265…

Friday, June 10, 2011

Religious Schools vs. Public Schools

As long as algebra is taught in school there will be prayer in school. -- Cokie Roberts

Friday, June 3, 2011

Post-Finals Advice

There are two rules for success: 1) Never tell everything you know.

Mathematical Certainty

Heisenberg may have been right.

Monday, May 30, 2011

Inside every large problem is a small problem struggling to get out.

Friday, May 20, 2011

Another (Optional!) PD...

A seminar on Time Travel will be held two weeks ago.

Thursday, May 19, 2011

TED Talks - First iPad Textbook

Hi there. I thought that you might be interested in this:
http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/mike_matas.html

Friday, May 13, 2011

Escher

I think it's in my basement. Let me go check upstairs. – M. C. Escher

Friday, May 6, 2011

Value

If you think education is expensive, try ignorance.

Friday, April 29, 2011

Creationism

Black holes are where God divided by zero.

Friday, April 22, 2011

The Counting Principle

There are 3 kinds of people: those who can count & those who can't.

There are 10 kinds of people: Those who know binary and those who don't.

Thursday, April 21, 2011

Mathematicians confuse Christmas and Halloween because OCT 31 = DEC 25.

Tuesday, March 22, 2011

Emergency Meeting = getting laid off

Vendors: All the Title I teachers just got told that we won't have jobs with Title I next year. We are continuing in the program until June 30th after which time we will be up in the air waiting for a placement somewhere.

The Title I program will undergo a massive restructuring after which point the program will be redesigned with a very different structure.

Monday, March 14, 2011

Happy Pi Day!

Happy 3.14159... Day!



Your birthday is in pi somewhere! Find out if it's in the first 1,254,543 digits:
http://www.facade.com/legacy/amiinpi/


Saturday, February 19, 2011

Good news/Bad News?

So for this past week I've been reporting to Beaudry instead of Bishop Conaty. Tina didn't like the way the principal and staff were using me (rarely and poorly) so she pulled me. I've been reviewing the Trans Math intake test and book, trying to correlate the two so that next year we(?) you(?) can target the specific questions students missed rather than trying to teach them straight through the book. Students' scores will probably go up if we do that.


Tina also told me just yesterday that I've been flagged in the HR system to try to find me a teaching job in a public school. I'm not sure why I can't just keep working on Trans Math. I'll certainly let you know what happens.

Have a good rest of the three-day break!

Friday, February 11, 2011

Tennis Games

A tennis championship is played on a knock-out basis, i.e., a player is out of the tournament when he loses a match
1. How many players participate in the tournament if 31 matches are totally played?
2. How many matches are played in the tournament if 110 players totally participate?

Answers for last week

1) Old Man Wrinkle spent one-fourth of his life as a boy, one-eighth as a youth, and one-half as an active man. If Man Wrinkle spent his remaining 8 years as an old man, how many years did he spend as an active man?
Let L = OMW's final age.

.25*L + .125*L + .5L + 8 = L
.875*L + 8 = L
8 = .125*L
64 = L

.5*L = Active man
.5*64 = 32 years

2) Mr. Brown has 8 black gloves and 8 brown gloves in his closet. He blindly picks up some gloves from the closet. What is the minimum number of gloves Mr. Brown will have to pick to be certain to find a pair of gloves of the same color?

He picks one, and it is of one color. The next one could either be a match or a different color though, so he needs to draw again. The third sock he pulls out will have to match one of the two previous ones pulled out. He only needs to draw three.



3) Last weekend, I went to play in the nearby park. It was really fun! I rode my new bicycle that Mom had given me for my birthday. On reaching the park, I saw that there was now a total of 20 bicycles and tricycles. If the total number of wheels was 50, how many tricycles were there?

(My personal favorite way of solving these is taking an extreme and working backwards from there.)
Assume all the vehicles were bikes. That means there were 20*2 = 40 wheels. We need 10 more wheels, and each time we swap one of the bikes for a trike, we add one wheel. Therefore we need to swap out 10 bikes. We end up with those 10 trikes and 10 (original 20 - swapped out 10) bikes.

Friday, January 28, 2011

Friday puzzle is back :-)

Here are a few because I've been negligent:

1) Old Man Wrinkle spent one-fourth of his life as a boy, one-eighth as a youth, and one-half as an active man. If Man Wrinkle spent his remaining 8 years as an old man, how many years did he spend as an active man?


2) Mr. Brown has 8 black gloves and 8 brown gloves in his closet. He blindly picks up some gloves from the closet. What is the minimum number of gloves Mr. Brown will have to pick to be certain to find a pair of gloves of the same color?


3) Last weekend, I went to play in the nearby park. It was really fun! I rode my new bicycle that Mom had given me for my birthday. On reaching the park, I saw that there was now a total of 20 bicycles and tricycles. If the total number of wheels was 50, how many tricycles were there?




Try to solve them each using two different methods (e.g. guess and check, drawing a picture, using symbolic representation / algebra, using verbal reasoning, using a formula, or any others you can think of). If you get different answers, check what you did. If you try or think of any other methods, post them here too!

Wednesday, January 26, 2011

If I had a nickel for every time that I've needed math, I would have 13 cents.
RT @thedayhascome

Benchmarks


I thought that this post from the Title I PSP Blog (which you can see on the right side of this page) was important enough to repost it here:

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TransMath Teachers: As you prepare for Benchmark 2, please administer the Baseline Assessment for the book level in which you are using. This will serve as a pre-test for the skills in that level. For Benchmark 3, you will use the Summative Assessment for that same level. This will serve as a a post-test for these skills. By comparing this data, we will be able to monitor student progress. This comparison will be used to determine if program goals on the Non-Profit Private School Consultation Agenda. Please feel free to contact me (terin.ngo@lausd.net) if you have any additional questions/concerns.
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Please do contact Terin with questions.