Ok English Teachers:

Is it me, or is this wrong?

I could be wrong, but it just doesn’t sound right.

It comes from one of the examples in the district-approved online math book.  Supposed to be matching the situation to one of the graphs given.

Mathematically Romantic

I’ve often told my students that math is everywhere.   This week I found it somewhere I never expected to.

One of my co-workers got married on Monday, they’d been together for 6 years, living together for a few years now.  They both wrote their own vows and during his he was talking about the ups and downs of their relationship. 

Then he said something like “but if you look at the trend line of those ups and downs, it’s by far on the up side.”

Trend line.  A mathematical construct, and a romantic way of saying although he realizes no relationship is perfect, that theirs is a very good one.

Now I can use “when you’re romancing your beau” to my “when will I ever use this” repertoire.

Geek Paradise, day 2.

Second and last day at IM Flash.  We spent most of the day in the computer lab doing statistical stuff.

We did get to build helicopters, little paper ones, that was fun.  First round we were given very little instructions on how to build them, and then we dropped them off a 2-story staircase in the main hall.  they even blocked off the area so that workers wouldn’t interfere with our work.

We timed their falls, did 3 trials and then went back to the computer lab and charted our results on this stats program they use there.  Made pretty graphs and discussed the mean, median, mode, range and standard deviation. 

The second round, we were given a template and specific instructions on how to build the helicopters, dropped them each 3 times and charted their times.  Amazingly (not really) the times for these were a lot closer.  what we didn’t expect, and probably should have, was that the second round helicopters all landed in almost exactly the same place.  The first round ones landed all over the place, one even on the 1 landing of the staircase.

This all led into a discussion about the causes of variation and how they use the stats to refine their production to minimize these variations.

All in all, it was quite interesting and we even had some fun doing it.  And we even got some IM Flash SWAG: shirt, computer bag, pens, keychain flashlight and even a teeny, tiny IM Flash chapstick.

I didn’t get any pictures of the first round of drops because they don’t allow any photography in the facility except for in specific areas.  One of the higher-ups showed up for the second drop, took a couple pictures so I asked him and he said it was ok for me to take them there also.

When you cross Micron with Intel…

What do you get when you cross Micron with Intel?

You get IM Flash Technologies in Lehi, Utah.

You get a building that is over a half mile from one end to the other.  They make those silicone chips that are the main part of the memory on your flash drives and mobile devices.

I got to spend the afternoon there today, and again tomorrow.   They came to this year’s last meeting of the group I work with (MfA = Math for America) at the University of Utah and invited us down to visit and learn about all the ways they use math at their company.

I learned a lot of stuff about how silicone chips are made, and especially about the quality control and the math involved in quality control.   They are looking for defects that are about 1/1,000th the size of a flea.  That disc you see above has over 200 124gig chips, and not all of them will be perfect.  Even on discs that can be shipped to their parent companies (Micron and Intel), they do a quality control map that will tell which ones are perfect, close to perfect, pretty good and completely useless.  The “prefect” ones go into mass storage units, like servers and cloud memory storage.  The “pretty good” ones are the ones they put into that $10 flash drive you bought.  Yeah, that little flash drive you have your life stored on is made from the inferior chips.  That doesn’t mean they are crap, just not up to par with the server ones.

Anyway, we got to go through the quality control area, saw the different processes they use and came close to some really dangerous chemicals they use.  Whee!  We even had to wear safety goggles.

We didn’t get to go into the actual FAB room (that white room where you have to wear the “bunny suits”, with the constant temperature and filtered air, but we did get to go into a viewing room that was a glassed in part of it.  Which meant:

getting on our goggles, latex gloves, little “CSI” booties, a hair net and smock.  By the way, he did tell us that if you have bad allergies, the FAB (fabrication) room is the perfect place to work.

Overall, it was quite interesting.   Tomorrow we get to work on some projects they came up with for these visits.  Total Math-Geek type fun, looking forward to it.

P.S. – the visit started with a great lunch.  A good way to start!

Brane ded.

11 hours and 20 minutes.  That’s how much time I spent today writing answers for a 7th Grade Math workbook.

A couple of years ago, Utah adopted the new Common Core standards for Math, even though there were no textbooks for it.  Last year we got a “textbook”, in the form of an online, interactive program.  All our textbooks were taken away, so there was nothing physical we could give to our students.

There are a lot of things to like about the program, but the biggest complaint I got was from parents who wanted a physical copy so they could have something to reference when helping their kids with homework.  They, like I did, learned how to learn math from a textbook.  We know how to read them, how to pick out what we need and bypass the stuff we don’t. 

So, the Utah State Board of Education gave a group of professors up at the University of Utah the money to write textbooks for the new 7th and 8th grade curriculum.  And being smarter than the average non-middle school teacher making stuff up for middle school students, they knew they needed actual middle school teachers to review their work and critique it.

That’s what I’ve been doing this summer.  Reading through their books and making suggestions on how to make it more student friendly.  For the most part, it’s been 3 hours here, couple hours there, maybe 6 hours a week tops.

Well, it’s the end of July and they want to have it completed before the school year gets too far along.  It’s crunch time.

Monday evening I got a call from one of the professors and she asked me if I could write the answers for the 7th grade chapter 4 workbook. 

Sure, no problem. 

Oh, and can you have it done by Wednesday night?

Yeah.  How hard can one chapter of 7th grade math be?

Uh, well.  It was 101 pages of charts, graphs, proportions, fractions and all the fun stuff that makes Microsoft Work go bonkers.  Handwritten, I could probably have done it all in 4 or 5 hours, but Word is not so math-friendly.

All-in-all, it took me over 16 hours to solve all the math and get it properly formatted on a Word document.  But I’m done, and now I’m going to bed.

Twofer

Some of you may not know that teaching (math) is my second career.  I was 33 when I became a full fledged teacher.

My first career was in the pizza business.  Right out of high school I started as a delivery driver for a very new local pizza place.  By the time I hit 25, I had worked my way up to General Manager of one of their 5 stores, gave that up to open up my own franchise of the company, gone bankrupt and returned to a General Manager position.  Today (literally) I’m still processing their payroll, which I’ve been doing on and off since 1980.

When I saw this on Facebook, I just had to laugh.  My two careers blended into one little Facebook blurb.  This is my own version, the pizza is from Free Wheeler, the pizza place I’ve been involved with since July of 1978.  The math is even correct, although z has been substituted for the r usually used for radius, and we normally use h for height instead of a.  But hey, that’s the beauty of variables, they can vary.

Another busy week.

It snowed last night,

and I woke up with an inch of snow on my car.

No, as far as I know, there was no snow in Salt Lake.  I was at a Mathematics conference up in Alta, Utah.  At an elevation of 8950 ft, it’s over twice as far above sea level as my house.

We had several hours of free time to just sit around talking about teaching math at the secondary level.  Not just a bitch session, we spent most of the time sharing ideas on how we were dealing with the new core, both it’s drawbacks and benefits and our successes and failures with it.

The six hours that were organized, we listened to Henri Picciotto and worked on math problems he proposed.

He isn’t another “expert” that has been working on theory and hasn’t seen a classroom for decades, he’s been teaching math at a high school in California for the last 30 years.  We weren’t bored at all, he was quite entertaining, and I know I got at least a couple things to bring back to my classroom.

I also ran into a few colleagues from the schools I have taught at, even roomed with one of them.  All in all, a great weekend.

I had to head up to Alta right from school on Friday, which hopefully explains why I haven’t been around the blogosphere much this week.

Math be Good.

When I go shopping I tend to keep a running tally of how much I’m spending.  I round up to account for tax, sometimes round down when I think I’ve done too much rounding up.  It gives me a good idea of how much I’m spending.

Today I got to the checkout counter, expecting it to be somewhere between $100 & $110.  It’s not a perfect system, if I got charged 30¢ extra for something I’d never know.

But today I noticed.  Harmons is having a 5 packs of meat for $20 deal this month.  Since I have a freezer in the basement I decided to take advantage of it and picked up 15 packs (about 1½ lbs each).

After he got done ringing me up the total was $132.47.  I knew something was wrong, but decided that instead of tying up the line just to find out I made a mathematical error, I decided to go over it at home.

Turns out I was right.  If you look at the receipt (click to see better)  it turns out that the first 5 packs were rung up as a group of 4 and a single one.  The computer is supposed to subtract the original amounts and add $20.  Well, it returned the single pack, but charged me the $20 plus the original $24.92 for the first 4 packs.

Fortunately I noticed this, went back to the store, was able to explain it to the Customer Service person and got a refund.

**Math nerd joke alert!**

I was on Google looking for some famous math quotes for my bulletin boards at school.  My counselor friend there and another friend have taken it upon themselves to set up my bulletin boards and wanted some quotes to put up. 

Among the other quotes by Albert Einstein, Plato, Leonardo Da Vinci and others, I found this amusing one:

“In the fall of 1972, President Nixon announced that the rate of increase of inflation was decreasing. This was the first time a sitting president used the third derivative to advance his case for reelection." – My dad.

Now, I know he’s been a math professor since before I was even born, and I don’t even know if he meant it to be funny.  But, knowing Calculus and his sense of humor (having inherited it), I couldn’t help but get a hearty chuckle from it.  And, of course, a little pride in his being quoted on several sites alongside those other people.

Math Tramp

.... I met for dinner with a bunch of the staff from the school I was at last year one last time before the new school year started. Even though it's been only a couple of months, it was good to see them and find out how things were going at their new schools. One teacher who had left in tears after finding out where she was going, is much happier about the situation now that she has had a chance to get out there a couple of times. A couple other teachers hadn't as good an experience, the worst being one of the science teachers. She wasn't at the dinner, but someone who had talked to her recently told us the story. One of the other science teachers at the school she was sent to ran into her and at some point told her "we were hoping to get -insert some other teacher's name here-, but instead we had to take you because your school closed." Nice. If it had been me, after recovering from the shock of someone having the chutzpah to say something that rude, I would have been tempted to give them the finger. I doubt she did.
.... Later we were talking about change, and I said something about liking it once in a while, and how I've been to 5 different schools in my career, and that I have no intention of spending my remaining 14 years at one school. The councelor chimed in with "You're such a tramp, a Math tramp." I think I'm going to get that on a license plate. Of course, since the state asks you to explain your request, they would never approve it, unless I could come up with some reasonable meaning that they would fall for. I've already had one personalized plate reposessed by the state, I have no desire to go for two. That plate had the french word "Merde", which you can have Babel Fish translate for you. I'd had the plates on my car for a couple of years before the state found out and revoked them. They did replace them with more acceptable ones, free of charge. If it had happened years later, I could have always argued that Jean Luc Picard (Star Trek TNG) often muttered the word under his breath during the first season. Probably wouldn't have helped, but at least I could have argued.