Leadership

I spent the last two days at an education conference in downtown Salt Lake City.  I’m not going to bore you with all the details, but the keynote speaker showed this video on leadership and making a movement.  I found a lot of good information in it and the more I thought about it the more his message made sense  But I also found it quite amusing.  Enjoy.  And don’t bother watching the last couple minutes, all the good stuff is over when he’s done talking.

P.S. Have you noticed I’ve become a fan of YouTube?

Jim

Cracks

It started with the cracks in the driveway.  I was thinking about the theme for this week, “branched”, trying to avoid trees, and that was the first thing I thought of.  But you can only get so many pictures of cracks in the cement, and none of them struck me as particularly awesome, so I went around the house looking for more cracks.  Happily, I didn’t find many.  Really happily, none of the ones I did find were in the foundation.  So I’m down in the basement I so cleverly describe as “the dungeon”, not finding many cracks, but I did find many things that branched out.  Electrical.  Phone.  Plumbing.  So, here’s the branches of my house.

Cracks in my driveway.  Looking at the cracks from a different perspective.  More cracks in the driveway.  No doubt I need to get a new driveway, needed it since I moved in 17 years ago, but I’m not ready for that project yet.Old and the new.  The duct work for my heater.  Some of it is new, some of it is from the original furnace installed sometime in the 30’s.  (It worked up until I put in the new one about 5 years ago.)  Some of the old wiring.  Don’t worry, there is no longer any electricity flowing through this stuff. Water pipes.  Since the house was built before indoor plumbing and electricity were common in homes, the dungeon is a hodgepodge of wires and pipes. This, at one point, routed the phone lines in the house.  And finally, the sewer pipes.  I thought about cleaning off the cobwebs and dust, but decided against it.

So there you go, a quick tour through the bowels of my house.  Thanks for coming, and be sure to tell your friends.

Conneckshuns-r-me

As Math teachers we’re encouraged to make connections between the math we teach and real life.  This is good.

But not always.  As Math teachers we really should make sure we understand the connections we are making.  As shown in this picture from failblog.org (sent to me by Mr. Gearhead). So, the math is right but the interpretation is wrong.  Proportionally speaking, if 2 of something takes 2 minutes then 3 of that same thing takes 15 minutes.

What the student realized, and the teacher didn’t, is that to saw a board into two pieces, it takes one cut.  To saw a board into three pieces it takes only two cuts.  So, 1 cut = 10 minutes, 2 cuts = 20 minutes.  The student is correct.

Taking it one step further (or back) according to the teacher’s math, it would take 5 minutes to not cut a board at all (1 piece).

Some people may think “Stupid teacher doesn’t even know their own subject.”  But they do know math, they just are clueless when it comes to carpentry.

I can only hope the student took the time to explain their thinking to the teacher, and that the teacher was willing to accept and admit their mistake.

One of these things is not like the others,

One of these things just doesn’t belong.

I was cruising through the library, going from the office to my classroom, because that’s the way to get there in the maze of a school I work at.  I glanced at the magazine rack and noticed one that just seemed out of place in a middle school library.  I laughed, pointed it out to the secretary and we laughed together.

So, can you tell me what seems out of place here: Click on the picture if you need (or just want) to see a larger version.

The answer will come in a later post.