Starting to build

Today in Mr. Ambrose's physics class, the students started building their bridges. They all seemed to be having fun with it, even the young lady who wasn't paying attention on Friday. Some of them got farther than others; gluing toothpicks together takes a bit of practice, to avoid disturbing other toothpicks while placing new ones. Some students did try to get the project changed - asking if we could use tape, or straws, or Popsicle sticks, or some other modification that would make it easier. Of course, if the bridges were easier to build, we'd require them to hold more than 2 pounds - after all, 2 pounds isn't all that much.

Having a project like this also makes it easy to walk around and talk to the students, and see how they're doing in general. One very bright, ambitious young lady is planning to visit the colleges that have admitted her, so she can figure out which one to attend. She's got quite a tour planned, including both Yale and Harvard. She's also begun to consider graduate school. I'm encouraging that - she's smart enough that she'd be able to get funding from any kind of graduate program, particularly with a degree from a well-known university. She's the type of student who will take advantage of every opportunity that's available to her, work hard, and make the most of it.

In Ms. Colwell's advanced algebra class, they were working on a review worksheet for an upcoming test. Some of the students were stuck on particular problems; for some of them, radical equations were a massive headache, so we worked through a few of them together. They also got a quiz back. One young woman was really frustrated with herself - she got a B on the quiz, and quite a solid one, but she saw that all of her mistakes were avoidable. For example, the square root of five, squared, is five; she had written down 25 in that step of the problem. She's determined NOT to do that on the test. At least, since her handwriting is nice and neat, she'd get partial credit because it's possible to see where the error is.

Some of the students still don't want to use their class time productively, to get actual work done. Some of them say that they're tired. I always sympathize with that, because I'm often tired, too. I've gone in to YHS sometimes when I've had only four hours' sleep, and if I wasn't so busy, I could have easily fallen asleep. Once some of them found out how often I'm up half the night, they knew that I understand what it's like to be tired. When I try to get them to work through something, they'll usually at least make an effort, even if they were up half the night themselves.

Their Spring Break will be coming up in a few weeks, but in the immediate future, they get a long weekend - they have both Friday and Monday off for Easter weekend. It seems to me that, second semester, they get a lot more long weekends than they did during the first semester.