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Algebra 10-12 assignment; Jan. 13

We began our review for the final today in class by going over some problems out of chapters 1 and 2 together.  The students then started working on their review packet for the day in class.  They will receive 1 packet per day each of the next three days to work on in class and as homework to prepare for the final exam on Thursday.

Assignment:  Final Review Packet #1

Taking issue

What the bottom of the page of the magazine tells me is that William T. McClay is the G.T. and Libby Blankenship Chair in the History of Liberty at the University of Oklahoma. That's impressive stuff. I haven't a clue exactly what discipline "the History of Liberty" is cataloged under, but I'm sure, somewhere along the line, Professor McClay, via his acute observations, earned the right to occupy the G. T. and Libby Blankenship Chair in its eminent domain. Seriously.

Still, I think one day last month or last year, he just woke up cranky. In the latest issue of The Hedgehog Review, he takes issue, you might say, with the ubiquitous usage of the word "issues," even tying it somehow to the post-modern world he experiences around him--somewhat negatively, I might add.

You know what he's talking about--people saying to others, "Well, to say the least, my old friend Sasquatch has issues." What we mean to say when we employ that expression is that there's some weakness we'd rather not disclose about old Sasquatch, something pertinent but not particularly suited to public consumption (wink, wink) for whatever reason.

But the usage doesn't simply extend to others; some of us say it of ourselves. "Of course, you must understand that I have issues with Representative _______ (kindly affix your most unfavorite politician). Or this, something more to the point of Professor McClay's lively little essay:  "I wasn't there--maybe I should have been. But I was having some issues with. . ."

Professor McClay gets all huffy because, he says, that worn expression is simply meant to obfuscate, to avoid the truth, because in this day and age--and here's where he gets a little snarky--it's far more politically correct not to affix blame, not to be specific, not to address significant weaknesses or "problems" (he talks about the usage of the word problems, too, by the way, just in case you have a problem with that).

Oddly enough I remember hearing "she has some issues" for the first time from a student at least a decade ago, and I remember the moment because I thought the usage was (sorry) quite cool but strictly age-sensitive, meaning probably not to be included within the working vocabulary of someone her professor's age (meaning me). You know, I just thought "have some issues" is something "young people" said, not old farts. Still, I liked it, in part because it sort of fit with a slight role of the eyes and tip of the head she gave me when she used the phrase: she looked at me sideways and grimaced just a hair. "Well, you know that so-and-so has some issues, don't you?"

It was sufficiently droll to be cool, right? It carried, back then, some freshness.

Now that phrase is at least a decade old, and my grandson was using it a couple years ago already in third grade, it's lost some currency.

McClay, from his padded chair at the U. of O., implies it is something of a symbol of our cultural demise (he'd probably not like me saying that, by the way). But I think, one day he just woke up cranky. Fresh usages always mature into crumpled old hats. Sparkling metaphors morph, over time, into cliche. When vivid new assessments get overused, we call them caricature. What's new gets old.

There may be other reasons why our culture is souring or dying on the vine. There are likely good reasons to claim that America isn't what it was or even is. It's not particularly difficult thees days--and it never is--to be a prophet of doom.

Take it from an old fart.

Honestly, I don't think I've ever used the phrase because I thought it belonged to that student who used it in my presence for the first time; today, it belongs to my grandson, too, who's now in sixth grade. 

Being retired, I'm too old for a real mid-life crisis; but lots of old fogies take dance lessons, right? Most of the men on motorcycles these days are bald or gray beneath those biker hair bands.  Maybe I'll use it here for the first time, about me and Professor McClay. 

Here goes:  "Professor McClay's interesting article in The Hedgehog Review caught my attention, but I have. . ."

Can't do it. Fill it in for me, with you please?

I've really got a problem with that line.  

Geometry assignment; May 16

We went over our homework on midpoints before taking the quiz on the first part of chapter 13 today.  The quiz took most of the rest of the period.  Once they were done with the quiz, the students then got started working on their homework assignment.


Assignment:  Midpoint and Distance Formula worksheet;  #2-12 even on front, #17-25 odds on back

Geometry assignment; Feb. 5

We began the first section of chapter 8 today by discussing the similarity among right triangles.  We cut out different triangles and reviewed the altitude, hypotenuse, and legs of a right triangle.  We then worked with the similarity between three different triangles.

Assignment:  page 280;  #1-25 all,  2 drawings of similar triangles

Algebra 10-12 assignment; 9/10

The lesson topic today involved working with various types of formulas.  The goal was to be able to take any formula and use the given information to arrive at an answer.  We worked through several examples of different formulas, making sure each time to use the correct units when needed.  The students then got started on their homework assignment for the latter part of the period.


Assignment:  section 1-9;  page 42-43;  #1-16 all, 21-23 all, 29-36 all


Chapter 1 review will be tomorrow in class

Chapter 1 Test will be on Friday  9/12

Remembering Frederick Manfred, 1912-1914 (conclusion)

A couple of years ago, I needed a picture of a country graveyard, so early one Saturday morning I headed out to Doon, where the cemetery hugs the rolling hills of the Rock River, a setting that offers a graveyard even more wordless gravitas. I can understand why Feik Feikema wanted to be buried there, looking down at his beloved Doon to the east, and across the spacious fields of corn and beans to the north, fields that, even in winter, don’t shed their spacious grandeur. 

That morning I wasn’t looking for his grave. It was cold—January—and I was looking for a photo that would feature the long shadows laid across stripes of snow and columns of stone by an early morning sun—just looking for something touching, really, trying to get something visually stunning.

That’s when I stumbled on the grave stone of a woman whose story I would know absolutely nothing of if I’d never read the novel, The Secret Place, a novel I bought four decades ago in a bookstore in Sheboygan, Wisconsin, a novel that in many ways changed my life. Here it is.

I know that good people felt used by that novel, even though the young woman buried beneath this stone probably suffered no abuse at all from Frederick Manfred, years later, when The Secret Place was published.

I met that woman, a prototype, in the pages of a book. She died at just 21 years of age, the stone says, way back in 1920. Still, that morning, it seemed to me that I knew her, or at least of her; and I couldn’t help wondering how many people on the face of the earth, even among her own descendents, had any inkling of her story.

“Till we meet again” the stone says, in mossy text.

I stood there beside that grave, sorry that she’d died so young, and sorry too that Feik Feikema caught all that rage from the town he loved when he was just trying to tell a story. On the other hand, that some people would be enraged at his using them made good sense to me. Their anger wasn't unreasonable.

That was a half-dozen years ago, at least. Eventually, that moment developed into a short story, something titled "January Thaw," a story which imagines what might have occurred at the moment when Frederick Manfred's mortal coil was returned to the earth in that same cemetery just outside of Doon, Iowa.  "January Thaw" is a story about Fred, a story about a writer, a story about what a writer chooses to tell once the stories tumble out of the imagination and how those he talks about might feel about being used. 

At the time, that story was the only one I'd ever written that was anything other than old-fashioned realism--this young woman, quite dead, taking on the venerable writer who had just been buried beside her, at a time when celebrity and magnetism and IQ, or even sheer physical power means nothing at all. She tells him she has a score to settle with the old novelist who told her story in his own way.

A year passed, or two maybe, and I started to believe there were more haunting stories in the cemetery where Fred Manfred is buried, a cemetery just up the hill from the town he loved, even if that love was greatly unrequited. Soon after the publication of The Secret Place, that very novel, vandals brought down the sign along highway 75 that once read "Doon--Home of Frederick Manfred."  

"January Thaw" will be published soon, again, in a collection of stories titled Up the Hill: A Collection of Fables (New Rivers). Feike Feikema may be gone now, up there, in the cemetery in Doon, but Fred Manfred is certainly not forgotten.

The morning I bumped into Jennie Van Engen's stone in the Doon cemetery, I couldn't help but be thankful for a story that made that very site alive with this even bigger story I’m telling, a sprawling yarn that will end only when the sun sets forever over the open spaces of a landscape Frederick Manfred loved and called Siouxland, a real tome that won’t be finished until the very last story of this broad land has finally been told.

This too is what I've learned from Fred Manfred.

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Geometry assignment; April 7th

We continued our work with determining the areas of various shapes today.  Today's topics were calculating the area of parallelograms and triangles.  We worked through several problems together for each topic and then the students got started on their homework.


Assignment:  compound shape worksheet  #1-6 all;  section 11-2;  page 431, #1-16 all  (don't do #4 and 14)

Geometry assignment; March 24

We went over our homework today and reviewed the topic of solving quadratic equations with our entry task.  We then finished off the last section of the chapter that involved finding segment lengths in circles.  The last of three tools involves a secant and a tangent.  The students then got started on their homework assignment during the last part of the period.


Assignment:  Segment Lengths in Circles worksheet #2

Wasicu at Chankpe Opi: A White Man at Wounded Knee II

The Ghost Dance, a ritual of what Ian Frazier calls “the first American religion,” is only one of many causes which led to the massacre at Wounded Knee, but for people of faith it merits a closer look.

There was no dancing here on the night before the massacre, December 28, 1890, but for almost a year “the Messiah craze” had spread throughout the newly sectioned reservations, as unstoppable as a prairie fire. A committee of Sioux holy men had returned from Nevada, where they’d met Wovoka, the Paiute who’d seen the original vision. They returned as disciples of a new religion.

Wovoka designed the ritual from his own visions. Erect a sapling in the middle of an open area, like the one in front of us now—the tree, a familiar symbol from rituals like the Sun Dance, then banned by reservation agents. Purge yourselves—enter sweat lodges, prostrate yourself before Wakan Tanka, the Great Mysterious. Show your humility—often warriors would cut out pieces of their own flesh and lay them at the base of that sapling to bear witness of their selflessness.

Then dance—women and men together, something rare in Sioux religious tradition. Dance around that sapling totem, dance and dance and dance and don’t stop until you fall from physical exhaustion and spiritual plenitude. Dance until the mind numbs and the spirit emerges. Dance into frenzy. Dance into ecstacy.

Now look back down into the valley, and imagine three hundred men and women being slain by the spirit, most of them writhing in fine dust. Such mass frenzy made wasicu of every denomination or political persuasion shudder. To them, it seemed madness on a cosmic scale—hence, “the Messiah craze.”

The exultation of the Ghost Dance was the vision given to those who fell in frenzy. When they would recover their senses, each of them would reveal what he or she had seen, a collective vision: life would be good, rich, abundant, everything the coming of the wasicu had ended. Jesus Christ, rejected by his own, had heard the voice of the people’s suffering and would bring them joy.

“The great underlying principle of the Ghost dance doctrine,” says James Mooney in his rich study written already in 1896, “is that the whole Indian race, living and dead, will be reunited upon a regenerated earth, to live a life of aboriginal happiness, forever free from death, disease, and misery.” It was that simple and that compelling, a vision of heaven.

For me as a white man, a Christian, it is not pleasant to admit that in the summer of 1890, the sheer desperation of Native people, fueled by poverty, malnutrition, and the near death of their culture, created a tragically false religion that played a significant role in what we’ve come to call, simply, Wounded Knee.

Throughout the West, the whole First Nation danced. What was peculiar to the Sioux, however, was this solitary tenet: those who wore the ghost shirt or ghost dress—the prescribed apparel of the faith—could assume themselves impervious to bluecoat bullets. Dancers could not die. They were holy.

It would be dead wrong to assume that that belief or any other created by the Messiah craze was the single cause for the horror that happened here in December, 1890. Others are far more prominent: the disappearance of the buffalo, the unceasing trek of white settlers onto traditional Lakota land, a long history of broken treaties, distrust on every side, the searing memory of “Custer’s Last Stand,” and, perhaps most of all, the inability of two peoples to understand each other. When you look down on the shallow valley of the Wounded Knee, bear in mind that what happened here is the confluence of many motives, some of them even well-meaning, but all of them, finally, tragic.

_____________________

Tomorrow:  What it looked like, here at Wounded Knee

Geometry assignment; May 2

We went over our homework today first that dealt with calculations with cones.  After the homework was turned in, the students then got started on their Chapter 12 quiz.  Once they finished the quiz, the students got started on their homework assignment.



Assignment:  Section 12-3;  page 493;  #9-16 all, 18

Geometry assignment; Feb. 20

After going over the homework, we introduced the concept of trigonometry ratios in class today.  The first ratio that we will talk about is the tangent ratio.  Initial calculations and problem solving techniques were demonstrated for the tangent ratio in class before students go started on their homework.

Assignment:  section 8-5;  page 308;  #1-12 all,  page 302;  #22, 24, 26

Algebra 10-12 assignment; May 21

Today's work centered on scatter plots and using line equations to draw lines of best fits on graphs.  We went over two large problems together that are EOC samples and then had a chance to work on an additional problem in order to get the homework started.

Assignment:  Scatter plot and line of best fit equation worksheet #1

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Geometry assignment; May 5

We went over our quiz together before starting today's lesson.  Today we focused on calculations involving pyramids.  We went over the lateral area, total area, and volume of a pyramid with several examples before getting started on our homework in class.

Assignment:  volume and surface area of pyramids worksheet

Morning Thanks--"The Summer Ends"

I am thankful, this morning, for Wendell Berry's poem "End of Summer" because it reminds me I'm not the only one who's depressed. It's five a.m., and ye old cat is howling, which is, after a fashion, my alarm clock as of late. He seems to know when I should be up-and-at-it, darn thing.

And what's so depressingly notable at five these days is that the whole world is inky dark, not a trace of dawn, not a hint, not a ray, no pale suggestion that something is rising anywhere. It's midnight outside, even though it's already five. Once the sun begins its annual arc to the south, it doesn't seem to inch along, it freefalls. Just yesterday, it seems, I'd rise to the morning. Now what's out there is desperately black. 

And very sad.

The Summer Ends

The summer ends, and it is time
To face another way. Our theme
Reversed, we harvest the last row
To store against the cold, undo
The garden that will be undone.
We grieve under the weakened sun
To see all earth's green fountains dried,
And fallen all the works of light.
You do not speak, and I regret
This downfall of the good we sought
As though the fault were mine. I bring
The plow to turn the shattering
Leaves and bent stems into the dark,
From which they may return. At work,
I see you leaving our bright land,
The last cut flowers in your hand.

Wendell Berry speaks for me this morning because, although I hate to admit it, the thrill is off the tomatoes. Big fat beans--what's left of the pickins--hang from scrawny plants like a lynched cluster of cattle thieves. My wife says that any day now I can just clean up the whole patch, a chore I'll have to push myself to do because the joy is long gone.

Somehow we escaped the torrent of heat that can melt man and animal this summer, so some of the relief we ordinarily feel when the weather moves northwest doesn't come with as great a joy as it can; instead, it just feels like fall. The clouds stop looking mid-summer, because it's not. "We grieve under the weakened sun," he says. Yes, we do.

Nice of him to offer hope the way he does with the last handful of the cut flowers. And a zillion poets at least have found some joy in the cycle of things, the the way the plow turns "the shattering/Leaves and bent stems into the dark,/From which they may return." That's nice too. It helps. Not a lot right now, but it helps.

Besides, I know morning midnights won't stay forever. Northwest winds will shake the place, make it shiver and rattle; but eventually they'll give in, once again, to warmth rising bountifully from the south.

Daylight is in freefall right now, every single day's slice of light noticeably thinner, as if the starving season 'twill soon be upon us. Those long January shadows will stretch across the day only because there won't be much day to stretch. It's coming. 

It's not difficult to understand why the Lakota would point a line of rocks at the exact position of the morning sun on solstice. They didn't want to miss the day to remember that, come morning, nothing gold can stay. Darkness was coming.

The voice in the poem is telling us the most precious message of all humankind can tell each other--that we are not alone.  I'm sure this poem didn't make Mr. Wendell Berry a rich man, but what his voice makes clear is priceless.

And now out east, the Creator's canvas takes on some pastels that do more than hint there will soon be a dawn, the gospel of the morning.
________________________ 

Wendell Berry's "End of Summer" is this morning's featured poem on The Writer's Almanac.

Geometry assignment; Feb. 4

We continued working with a review of radical expressions.  We focused on the operations involved with radical expressions today and the process of rationalizing the denominator.


assignment:  Working with radicals worksheet

Sunday Morning Meds--Envy

“Refrain from anger and turn from wrath; 

do not fret—it leads only to evil.” Psalm 37

“Of the seven deadly sins,” so writes Joe Epstein, “only envy is no fun at all.”  Sloth may not be a party animal, but certain it is that some of us, at least, on some mornings, would choose the pillow to morning coffee. 

But envy, Epstein says in his book titled, simply enough, Envy, is neither pleasurable nor fashionable—and probably never has been.  Envy is the principle sin of someone who is, as he says, small-hearted, or petty, neither of which are enviable descriptions.  Furthermore, if you’re guilty of serial envy, you’re a whiner.  Most people hate whiners.

           

Epstein claims that there is a word for envy in every human language, which suggests that the sin—and it is a sin—is perhaps most universal of any of the Seven Deadlies.  We all know people without much pride; lots of people aren’t tempted by food or drink (I’m not one of them); some lust mightily, others not at all.  Joe Epstein may be right—very, very few could say innocently than they had never envied anyone anything.

Why all this chatter about envy?  The origins of the word fret are in eating, not so much as in “eating something,” as in “being eaten.”  My mother’s fretting, on which I’ve already said too much, was more worry than envy, of course; but there is something similar in both conditions because what used to bother me about her worrying is that she can be eaten up by it and thereby fail to rejoice in the joys of this life.  Similarly, envy—like jealousy—eats upon itself, as Othello knew only too well.  As does King David.

           

In some ways, perhaps this single verse suggests why David wasn’t allowed to build the temple, the job he wanted more than anything.  Nathan told him, after all, that it was a blessing reserved for his son, Solomon, but not for the King because David’s hands were bloody.  The cause/effect sequence of this line seems clear to me:  in a verse that has much to do with anger and wrath, David is warning us, in song, that envy has much to do with sin.  The implication is that those who do envy compound their sin by getting burned about it and then acting.  I don’t think I do, but David must have—and likely did.

           

While envy may well be something nearly universal among us, acting in wrath as a result of envy is not.  David may be warning us about some weakness he darned well needed warning about; but his weaknesses may not be ours.   At least they’re not mine.  I certainly envy writers who sell a ton of books and photographers who take month-long expeditions to some African veld.  But I don’t think I’ve ever become angry at them.  David’s envy might have. 

My sins—like his—are, I admit, more than I can count.  My righteousness and his sinfulness isn’t at issue here.  What may be, however, is David himself.

What I’m wondering is whether this particular line of scripture doesn’t describe David more fully than it does the rest of us.  I think it does. Yet, I think the psalm is actually more inspired because it offers us the poet himself.  He was human, like us.

Even though I may never fall victim to King David’s weaknesses, in telling us about him this passage still tells us more about ourselves as human beings.  And that’s always a gift, and a blessing because it’s the truth, a significant component in the whole gospel truth. 

I know David better, know myself better—and resultingly understand grace more fully than I did before.  That’s good news.

Algebra 10-12 assignment; May 13

We went over the homework today before taking a look at how the quadratic formula is used to solve equations.  We went through 2-3 examples together before the students got started on their homework.


Assignment:  quadratic formula worksheet  #1-7 all