Doing the Wave

Mr. Ambrose has started a new topic in physics - wave motion. Today, after a brief lecture, he had the students experimenting with long extension coil springs - and by long, I mean about 6 or 7 feet in their relaxed state. They worked in pairs and created both transverse and longitudinal waves, generated standing waves, and saw that waves would bounce off of the other end and return, and that two waves would pass through each other. There was no formal lab report, but they were required to participate, and most of them seemed to be having fun with it.

In Ms. Colwell's algebra class, they're getting ready for a quiz on Monday. They really don't want it then, but the snow day earlier this semester did disrupt the schedule a bit. I can sympathize with them - a day off at the time is nice, but it does have repercussions later. I talked with one of the young women in the class who had trouble grasping the whole purpose of imaginary numbers, and she's happier with some of what they've done more recently - their warm-up today included a problem on compound interest. She could not only understand that problem, but also see how it impacts her life. Imaginary numbers seemed very abstract to some of them. They're also working with powers, and most of them seem to understand that fairly well. Ms. Colwell always tries to tell them about applications for the math they're learning, so she mentioned that a lot of equations in science have a variable to some power.