Almost to the break...

Most of the students seem really excited about Thanksgiving break. They don't have class Wednesday, Thursday, or Friday. I'm a little envious - when I was in high school, I only got Thursday/Friday off for Thanksgiving. A five-day weekend is pretty generous!

In Mr. Ambrose's class, they were reviewing for a test tomorrow. As usual, some of the students are getting the material really well, and others still need work. We'll see how they do on the test. There's one young man who's been doing a tremendous job - he's obviously been working hard, since he's pulled up his grade from the "OK/good" range to "great". He's doing all the stuff that he's been told he should to succeed - taking notes, at least trying problems even if he doesn't understand them, paying attention in class - and it's paying off. I'm really happy to see it, since it'll carry through to his future in college as well. What some of these kids need to learn is that putting in an effort is a big part of the battle - if they do that, they're ahead of a lot of people already. Anyway, their test is over Newton's Laws, including the good old familiar F = ma, and they also have friction in that unit. After the break, they'll be getting to the mathematics and force behind circular motion. They've already touched on it in lab - the fact that things won't go in a circle unless there's a force acting on them - and now they'll get the detailed treatment.

In Ms. Colwell's class, they're working on reflection and rotation using matrices. Some of the students still need practice with matrices, but they do have a fair amount of homework so they're getting the practice. On Friday, I gave a short presentation in the class, on how matrices are used in robotics. Those are rotation matrices, so they tied in quite well with what they're doing now. It also gave them a preview that the trigonometry they're going to learn later on will also be useful.

It's amazing to see how fast the year is going - it seems like just a short time ago, I was over at YHS for the first time, and now we're approaching the holidays. Before long, it'll be the end of the year - what an incredible thought.