Just a few weeks to go...

There are only a few weeks left for seniors - about five weeks, as I recall, though if you ask them, they can tell exactly how many days they have left! Some of them are getting restless and it seems harder for them to settle down and pay attention. I can certainly sympathize - I remember what it was like when I was a senior - the weather was warm, an exciting future beckoned, and it was difficult to keep in mind that high school wasn't quite over yet.

In physics, Mr. Ambrose is teaching them electricity. Some of the material is difficult, but he's giving them a variety of harder and easier problems, so they can work their way into the hard stuff. Even though some of them grumbled a bit at first about the bridge project, they were asking for a new design project, so we're going to see what kind of an electric design project we can come up with - perhaps something where they make resistors, or capacitors, and put them into a simple circuit. It has to be complex enough to be challenging, but simple enough to get done in the remaining class time.

In Ms. Colwell's class, they're starting to get into trigonometry. Some of them seem to be picking up on it easily, but others aren't quite comfortable yet with our friends sine, cosine, and tangent. As usual, they wanted to know what this stuff is good for. One use, naturally, is in physics, with vectors. I also mentioned that you can use it anytime you're looking at angles - for example, if you want to know if you can get a piece of furniture through a doorway and perhaps around a corner. I'll give some thought to it, and see if I can come up with a few other good examples of trig that would be interesting and connect it to their lives.