Geometry assignment; 9/2

Today's topic involved adding to our language of geometry by discussing the terms ray, segment, midpoint, and bisector.  Each one of these terms involves various symbols and drawings, as well as some calculations.  We went through several examples before getting started on the homework.


Section 1-3;  page 15-16;  written exercises #1-40 all

Something to see and behold

You know, for most of the year the Floyd River isn't much more than a little joke. For most of the year, only a bulimic would put a canoe in the water here, if he could find enough to float it. For most of the year, you wonder how fish even make a home in the Floyd. 

The Missouri--now there's a river. The Tennessee is really something to behold. Sometime I ought to hike across the Mississippi instead of taking the car. The Floyd? Seriously, for most of the year, you can cross it most anywhere and not wet a knee.

But this morning the lights from house across the channel are laying long and strange stripes across a whole body of water. This morning the Floyd is no creek--it's a river. 

Last year's Memorial Day flooding was, we were told, "a century flood." 

Maybe.

Does this year's mean we've begun a whole new century?  

Yesterday, we were doing fine until late morning when a wall of water from up north surged down, blew out channel walls, and swept through the neighboring fields, creating Floyd's Lake.  It's strange and it's beautiful out here now; and we're not really affected, if you're wondering. Floyd's Lake is far enough away that we don't have to worry, although the back corner of our acre is a fairly decent water hazard. 

But then, no one's golfing so big deal.

The neighbor's beans are underwater, but they were last year too and he still had a bin buster come fall. He says he never really missed a crop down here in the floodplain, hard as that is to believe. 

Here's the problem, I'm told. Big dumps of rain, like we've had in the last week, happened up river somewhere--as many as ten inches over miles and miles of open cropland, way too much water to be absorbed. Guess what?--it had to go somewhere. From the headwaters in Osceola County, to Sheldon, to Hospers, there are only two little tributaries. From Hospers to Alton and all the way to LeMars, there aren't any. That mass of water hasn't a place to back up, the channel, meager as it is, has to handle all of it.

Well, it can't. Poof!--we've got a flood. Like right now.

In 1953, all that water swept down into Sioux City and killed 14 people, three of them kids, even though that wall of Sheldon floodwater came by to visit mid-morning. It swallowed Leeds, crowded into downtown, and destroyed the stockyards. People crossing the viaduct had to be rescued. Little Floyd's River--that's what Lewis and Clark named it--was a killer.

That's why, today, the Floyd does no more wilding. It's been straight-jacketed by a flood control system that tamed its temerity. That's nice. Something's lost when we toy with a river, even little Floyd. Something's lost when it can't teach us that we can't control everything.  Something's lost when it ceases to be a source of wonder.



But you can't blame Sioux City for locking up a mass murderer, and that's what Floyd's River was in 1953.

Right now, out behind the house, we've got a lake. There's something stunning about that, something that stops you in your tracks and last night turned the gravel road over the bridge into a busy thoroughfare.  Last night there was no end to cars, a steady stream (pun intended) of rubber-neckers. That's all right. Floyd's Lake is something to see and behold.

Yesterday, I had an meeting in Sioux Falls. We started out early expecting trouble at the Big Sioux. About 45 minutes later, we turned around and came home. Couldn't get over the river. The flooding is incredible. Nobody alive in Rock Valley, Iowa, will ever forget the June flood of 2014 because what they have in Rock Valley right now is Rock Lake. They're suffering.

Fourteen people dead in the Floyd's flood of 1953--that was suffering. 



Twenty-five dead back in 1893--that was suffering.



For the next couple days all we've got is a brand new lake home. 

Still, it's something to see and behold. 

To see and behold.

Geometry assignment; May 28

We went over our homework in class today and did a short entry task before getting started on our third and final transformation.  Today we worked with rotations and used patty paper to show how these transformations can be accomplished on a graph.  I went through a couple of examples with the students together before they got started on their assignment independently.


Assignment:  Rotations worksheet

Commencement: You go, girl

The speaker was really very good that year; the pomp and circumstance was, as always, regal; the spectacle--all those robed faculty and grads--proud and worthy.

I've attended more than my share of college commencements, so I won't be faulted for looking around some. Besides, my appointed seat was far, far to the left of the speaker and the college pres. I was in the first row, staring up at the graduates' feet since they were on just in front of me, up on the stage.

This young grad's tattoo was right smack dab in front of my eyes: "Walk By Faith." A dreamy butterfly sits atop a sweet tendril of beneficent ivy, quite the creation. She must have been under the needle for a while.

Commencement means beginning, and graduations are--a new moment in time for those who are leaving the academic nest.

A Christian college, like the one where I worked, hopes and prays its grads will be tattooed by their education here, in just about exactly the way this young lady's right foot is, with some statement of faith that feels, like this one, part-promise and part-command. The young lady with the tattoed foot took the college's faith mantra--"every square inch"--and brandished it in a way few of her profs, experts in the field, had ever thought of.

There it was, right and front of me, like forever almost.

Women have painted their toenails for hundreds of years, but the juxtaposition was somehow enough to make me giggle. "Walk by faith," it promises, but keep your toenails pink. And what about those slivery-heeled flip-flops? An oxymoron almost, but a real fashion statement. I bet she took one look at those on the rack, and told herself she couldn't leave the store without 'em. 

Those sweet feet drew me back into the old baffling biblical line about "be yet in, but not of," for there's something almost mysteriously compelling about this young lady's bold right foot. Is that tattoo "of the world"? Most certainly is, as much an accessory as the well-heeled flip-flops and the flaring toenails. If it's just pretty, it's sinful, saith Elijah, the old man who sat there staring at that foot.

Thoreau says he would rather that people wore tattoos than a half-dozen different shirts because a tattoo is for all time, and a tux--or a graduation gown--isn't.  He had a point.

Here's what I thought: give the tattooed girl forty years and her ankles won't be as slim, nor her feet be so tan and darling. She'll likely drop the toenail polish, but the tattoo will still be there, fuzzier maybe, but it'll still be there, no matter how frumpy the shoes.

Good for her, I'm thinking.

Then again, that tattoo reminded me of her whole generation, young people immensely spiritual and immensely drawn to the things of this world--almost as if Christ had never said word about the impossibility of serving two masters. Does she really believe that cute little tattoo is a testimony? Or was it just something she got because she wanted one and she knew her old man wouldn't hit the roof if it saluted something in the Bible?

"Moral therapeutic deism," researchers called it back then, the often sketchy faith of her entire generation. They know faith has something to do with being good, and also that it's good for them, like spinach--and at the heart of it is a God, sort of.  "Sure I'm a Christian--read my t-shirt! See this tattoo I got down here? And I got another one, just as nice, on my tush. John 3:16."

I know--I'm a grumpy old man, but I still wonder whether "walk by faith" is the best thing I saw all morning at that college graduation or the worst?

She was cute, this girl--and, when it comes right down to it, so were her feet. Maybe a little silly, too, tattooed like that, but then, aren't we all a little silly sometime or other? Shouldn't Christians be a little silly?

Besides, they say you can get 'em taken off these days, those tatoos. But then would removing it belie it's testimony?  I don't know.

God almighty will have his way with her, just as he has his way with all of us, tattooed or not, barn coats or mink stoles, shirts or skins. It's his world, and we're his people.

All of that's four years ago already. I hoped she's still saying it, wherever she puts it. 

Go ahead and walk by faith, lady, I should have said.  

You go, girl.
_____________________ 

An old post from 2010, from Commencement. There's another today.

Under His Wings--Morning Thanks

"In the whole collection," says Spurgeon, "there is not a more cheering Psalm, its tone is elevated and sustained throughout, faith is at its best, and speaks nobly." He's describing Psalm 91, a poem he earlier calls "this matchless ode."

Dozens of hymns, I'm sure, offer variations, but the one most familiar to me--because most sung--may well be "Praise to the Lord, the Almighty," which was--as YouTube will be glad to point out--one of the majestic hymns sung at Westminster Cathedral for the 60th anniversary of the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II. I'm an old three-chord guitar strummer myself, but--trust me!--no crooning troubadour does that exalted hymn justice because it requires a pipe organ and some ancient, soaring cathedral. 

A thousand worship services have engraved that 17th century hymn's text forever in my memory. I know that hymn, in that grand old phrase, "by heart." So when you suddenly stumble on a new stanza, the effect is jarring, as it was last Sunday, when we sang that old classic in a tiny congregation in a staid old church nothing like the Westminster Cathedral.

Here the one I'd never seen before:

Praise to the Lord, who hath fearfully, wondrously, made thee;

Wings of His mercy did shade thee.

Health hath vouchsafed and, when heedlessly falling, hath stayed thee.

What need or grief ever hath failed of relief?

You don't have to be Robert Frost to see that those middle two lines border on the archaic; we don't regularly vouchsafe things anymore, or if we do, we don't use that word. What's more, both lines feel remarkably like log-jams; they don't fall trippingly from the tongue. They are, in the vernacular, just plain clumsy, hard to get thy lips aroundeth.

That's what I'm thinking anyway, as we sing the lines. But then there's the last--"wings of His mercy did shade thee." 

How often I haven't sung those words from Psalm 91, "this matchless ode"? Hundreds of times. I even titled a book with that image--In His Feathers, a story drawn from the journals of a woman who died from ovarian cancer. 

He will cover you with his feathers,
and under his wings you will find refuge;

I don't know why, but singing that line suddenly took me out at the knees: God almighty as a goose. A dozen of them are sitting right now, at dawn, in the bean field between our house and the river, clumsy fat guys silent as church mice for a change. In a minute, when they get a hankering, they'll take wing and start the kind of bickering honkers think of as a music. No right-thinking palace guard would have let 'em in to the Queen's Sixtieth, that's for sure.  

"Under His wings"?--some respectable editor should have caught that monstrosity long ago and red-penciled it right out of Psalm 91. God as a goose? It's weird enough to think of the Holy Ghost as a goose, but one of our most beloved biblical metaphors pictures the Creator of heaven and earth, the one God eternal, the I AM of eternal history as a fine, feathered friend--a goose or a banty hen. 

But then, the neighbor says that about an hour before a torrential rainfall late Sunday afternoon, the local gaggles all parleyed and all those geese left the water, swarmed up from the river and the sand pits like the people of Israel, and waddled, with their young, into the middle of the bean field, as if some goose meteorologist had warned of the deluge to come. Inside of an hour, the river rose two feet.

There they were, he said, prophesying, proclaiming salvation beneath a nasty sky, keeping their young under their wings and in their feathers.

Must have been beautiful.  

Praise to the Lord, the Almighty, King of creation, who is, in addition to everything else, King of the Geese.

All of that is worth my morning thanks: a drama based on Psalm 91 right here in our river valley cathedral.

Beneath Siouxland skies

According to Robert Swierenga, the Dean of Dutch-American scholarship, immigrants from the Netherlands were serious clusterers:  not only did they originate in the same Dutch communities, they arrived in America with folks from those communities and then stayed in communities they created in America. We were--at least the 19th century Calvinist brand of Dutch immigrants--quite unashamedly clannish, even tribal. 

To anyone who knows us, that's not news.

Take the immigrant Schaaps, seen above.  Old Cornelius C., the bearded patriarch, took his family over in 1868, when, family lore has it, he could no longer abide the scandalous liberalism of the State Church, the Dutch Reformed Church, in Midsland, on the island of Terschelling, where he lived and where there was no pious seceder church. I doubt his reasons were totally spiritual--that is, I'm guessing economic motivations prompted the move as well; but when the Schaaps came to America, they came with a whole gang of like minded folks, malcontents the local Terschelling parish was probably happy to see depart. 

Once in America, they didn't go their separate ways. They got on a train for German Valley, Illinois, because a woman they knew back home knew the preacher there, who said he'd do what he could to get them acclimated, the whole bunch.

It was three years after the Civil War, and free land was to be had not all that far west (what paleface gave a thought to the Native people?). So when C. C. and Neeltje Schaap got a hankering for a chunk of their own land-of-the-free and home-of-the-brave, they lit out for the northwest corner of Iowa, where a bunch of Hollanders claimed good land was to be had. Once again, en masse, they settled in just a bit north of here, between Newkirk and Hospers. All of them. Most anyway. They stayed together. 

They left together and stayed together, maybe more than the other European ethnics, even though the rural Midwest is still mapped with their footsteps--Brussels, Luxumbourg, New Prague, New Berlin, New Holland, New Glarus, and etc.

When we moved to Siouxland (was there ever such a terrible misnomer?), the Schaap bloodline was, in essence, returning. Not one of my father's generation ever set foot on Siouxland soil, even though C. C. and Neeltje are buried right here. Their son, a preacher, left children sprinkled hither and yon in the pilgrimage of his pastorates. My father, born in 1918, never knew his Schaap grandparents, who'd died a decade before. 

But C.C. and Neeltje's great-grandson--me!--grew up in Dutch-American America; and even though I never knew a soul who wore wooden shoes or wore orange during World Cup soccer, my world was almost totally Dutch-American. When, after college, I lived among Swiss folks from southwest Wisconsin, I knew I wasn't what they were--but I also knew that they weren't much different--except their cheese of choice was. . .well, you guessed it.

Last night in Siouxland (note name), in windmill park in Orange City (note name), a mariachi band played for an hour or so, eight or nine men in fancy, traditional outfits, a couple of fiddlers, three or four guitars, two trumpets--you know the sound. Thousands of mariachis sing and play and make weird noises all over this country today, but, listen to this!--this one was local. They were from here. Their address is Hawarden, Siouxland.

I'm not making this up.

At the turn of the 20th century, my great-grandparents, who died here, could never have guessed that a gang of local Mexicans would make the music they did--and not a psalm all night long. When C.C. and Neeltje's great-grandson moved to Siouxland, 75 years later, I still would not have guessed that would happen. A gang of men's quartets wailing out gospel faves--sure. Mariachis, no way. 

When my father-in-law started farming, horses did the heavy work. He had a car, but he'd never been on an airplane. Rural electrification came along during his lifetime--poof! just like that there was light. Most people his age couldn't afford books. They ate food they grew, had basements shelves lined with canned goods, and kept their houses warm--through mean winters--with coal, and sometimes corn cobs. They did their business outside; if they were rich, they had a two-holer.  

But no neighborhood change, I'll assert here, is quite so dramatic as today's immense Hispanic presence. 

Some would move them all back, line up buses from here to Hawarden, fill 'em up with gas, and point them south. The bottom would fall out of the economy in a day or two.

Last year, when this house was going up, I liked to stop by and watch craftsmen do their work. I'd been in a classroom too long, never really knew people who framed a house or hung drywall. One day the insulators came in, a gang I knew were Netherlands Reformed, a particularly staunch and clannish form of Dutch Calvinism (not redundant).  

I stepped up into the house, looked around, had to hunt a bit, but finally found them, filling every nook and cranny with insulation. All--every last one of them--were Hispanic.

There we sat last night, in our lawn chairs, out front of the band shell, listening to a mariachi band from just down the road in Hawarden.

Amazing. 

One more thought.  Here's this morning's dawn.

Just up the river from here, just behind those trees, the Floyd takes a hairpin turn and circles back on itself. Right there at the crook of the stream, an old vet says he once found Native American artifacts from a time--say 1800--when the Yankton Sioux lived right out here on the bank. 

It's interesting, isn't it, that some July morning this sweet pastel sky might have looked exactly the same to them, long before C. C. Schaap and before his grandson and before those mariachis. 

It's His, you know, this world. Not ours.  For clusterers, that's humbling.

Geometry assignment; May 21

We went over our homework before going through the last topic on our review of linear equations.  We went over several examples with the point slope equation of lines before having the students get started on their homework.  The assignment deals with converting a variety of information into the slope intercept form of linear equations.


Assignment:  section 13-7;  page 555,  #1-28 all

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Algebra 10-12 assignment; 9/12

We went over a quick entry task review today and answered some homework questions to begin the period.  The rest of the time was devoted to taking the Chapter 1 test.

When they finished the test, the students had the chance to do an extra credit worksheet if they chose to.


Assignment:  none;  extra credit worksheet optional

Geometry assignment; 9/12

We went over some homework questions today before beginning the lesson.  Today's lesson involved an activity in which students made drawings of various geometric figures.  After drawing them, the students then constructed 3-D models of the drawings.


Homework:  finish the drawings that the students did not complete and then complete the other side of the activity worksheet.


Chapter 1 test on Tuesday   9/16

Algebra 10-12 assignment; May 12

We went over our entry task and homework today before continuing our work with quadratics.  We worked with solving more types of quadratics in various forms today.  The skill of working with radicals and finding both a positive and negative solution for perfect squares was used to solve the problems we worked on.  The students got started on their assignment at the end of the period.

Assignment:  Solving More Types of Quadratics worksheet  #1-37 odd

Geometry assignment; March 3

We began our unit on circles today with an introduction to some new terms as well as a review of some calculations that the students have seen before in previous math classes.  Radius, circumference, area, diameter, center, secant, tangent, chord, and point of tangency were all discussed and demonstrated.  Working with congruent and similar circles and concentric circles were also aspects of this unit that students were introduced to.

Homework:  circle calculation worksheet #1-9 all;  section 9-1;  page 330;  classroom exercises #1-10 all

Algebra 10-12 assignment; Feb. 25

We kept working with rules of exponents today, adding three more to our exponent tool box.  We went over raising a power to a power, raising a product to a power, and raising a quotient to a power in today's lesson.  The students then had time to get started on their homework before the end of the period.

Assignment:  Operations with exponents WS #2  (#1-40 all, 41-57 odd)

Book Review--The Conquest: The Story of a Negro Pioneer

The story goes that James Fennimore Cooper, a gentleman born with considerably more than a silver spoon, got into a tiff with his wife when the two of them wagered that he could--or couldn't--write a better novel than the one Mrs. Cooper was reading. He said he could; she said he couldn't.

Writing novels was not a calling for Cooper, but then he was so wealthy he didn't need a vocation. Still, James Fennimore Cooper is oft considered America's first real novelist. His oeuvre is almost as long as it is classic, even though Mark Twain debunked him so horribly it's a wonder his work survives: 

A work of art? It has no invention; it has no order, system, sequence, or result; it has no lifelikeness, no thrill, no stir, no seeming of reality; its characters are confusedly drawn, and by their acts and words they prove that they are not the sort of people the author claims that they are; its humor is pathetic; its pathos is funny; its conversations are -- oh! indescribable; its love-scenes odious; its English a crime against the language.Now that's an unsettling review. 

Don't know if novel-writing suffers when would-be writers take it on because they're sure they can do better, but Oscar Micheaux is another who did. Micheaux, the son of a slave, was born in a Mississippi River town named Metropolis, a town just as much Kentucky as Illinois. When he was 17 he picked up and moved to Chicago, where, for the most part, his first novel The Conquest: the Story of  Negro Pioneer, is set. 

A whole section of the novel is set in South Dakota actually, where Micheaux himself homesteaded.  You read that line right. I was as shocked as you are. Oscar Micheaux, a black man, settled and homesteaded South Dakota land just outside of Gregory, South Dakota. In fact, this land, right here up the road.

It's almost impossible to imagine African-American homesteaders. They're supposed to be Dutch or German or Bohemian, Norwegian or Swede.  But Black?  Thousands of African-Americans tried their luck at "proving up" Great Plains homesteads. Most failed, just like most white families did, my own among 'em.  It takes a some wherewithal to weather the seasonal blows of Great Plains misfortunes.  

Conquest feels autobiographical, because it is. Oscar Devereaux Micheaux's hero is Oscar Devereaux--that didn't take much of a twist. Both Oscars homesteaded. Both Oscars wrote novels as a way of trying to make some quick cash. Both Oscars failed at first marriages. I'm sure the list goes on.

The novel wouldn't be remembered at all if it weren't for Micheaux himself, as well as the oddity of a black man breaking Great Plains ground just west of the Missouri, a black man surrounded by white ethnics and displaced Yankees all trying their hand at making a life on what seemed to be free land (no one asked the Lakota).  

It's not a great novel, but it's endlessly interesting because what it offers is a look at late-19th century African-American life. Most of the novel centers on Black life and culture, which offered its own set of issues, even of bigotry and racism. The cursed villain of the tale is a snake-oil preacher-man, lionized by his meek congregation, not to mention his sociopath daughter.  Conquest often feels like a melodrama.

Sometimes novels tell us who we are even if they don't try. Micheaux wrote The Conquest to make some bucks--Devereaux, the novel's protagonist, certainly does anyway. But a century later the novel's great strength is that it offers a glimpse of another time and place, a panorama not readily available elsewhere. When Fred Manfred's Green Earth came out, not all of Siouxland was proud. However, if you want to know anything about Dutch Calvinist life in northwest Iowa between the world wars, there's almost nothing else to read. 

Besides, Micheaux himself is a wonder, an African-American homesteader, a son of slaves on the open prairie, a South Dakota novelist, a Hollywood film-maker.  I'm sorry. It's still amazing.

He was, for certain, an innovator. When a Hollywood director wanted to make the novel into a movie, Micheaux agreed, then pulled out when the director didn't want him to have a say in the way the story was told. In a snit, Micheaux started his own film company in Sioux City--that's right, in Sioux City, Iowa.  

It didn't take long, however, and he'd gone off Hollywood himself and was writing, directing, and producing movies that still called "race films" because they were intended to play to a segregated movie audience, to the African-Americans who could get in to only those theaters open to African-Americans. Without a doubt, he was more successful at movie-making than he was at novel writing. 

The bookends of the novel (spoiler alert!) is Devereaux's love of a white woman, his determination not to pursue his relationship with her (for reasons of race), and, eventually his return to her, the love of his life, when she discovers something important about her own familial lineage (go ahead, guess).  

Nobody will ever lug The Conquest: The Story of a Negro Homesteader along to the beach. Only scholars and other folks interested in out-the-way museums and rusting highway markers will likely read it. 

But I liked Conquest, and I liked visiting the ground the man worked, too. I liked thinking about him out there in frontier Gregory, South Dakota, about him starting a film company in Sioux City, Iowa, about his star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.

Oscar Micheaux was the son of slaves. He didn't have Cooper's great wealth or position. He came from nothing at all, wrote novels, made movies for his people. 

The Conquest is not a good novel, but it's great, great story.  

Sermon and symbol

To me, that morning he seemed more adamant than he normally is, more given to narrow his eyes and speak with his hands. He's not pushy. He's given to smiles more than scowls. There's normally no grimacing in his pulpit demeanor. He's endearingly off-the-cuff about things.  He'll stop the liturgy of worship service if he thinks of something funny or simply decides he should say what he's come up with behind the pulpit. He's a great guy and a fine pastor. We like him a great deal.

But he seemed a few shades more "the preacher" that Sunday morning, more "thus-saith-the-Lord." The subject was the Bible itself, the Word, the Holy Scripture. He was for it, of course, and adamant about our need to study it, to know it, to gather in and live out of its eternal wisdom. No hellfire and brimstone--he didn't warn us of turbulence in days to come if we didn't study it hard and take it to heart. He was just more adamant about things than he usually is. He wasn't being cute and nice or sweet about the Word--he was serious. It was our calling to know the Bible.

What he pointed out needs to be said. The Gallup people made it very clear when they researched Bible knowledge in the U.S. of A., not long ago: "Americans revere the Bible--but, by and large, they don't read it," their study said. "And because they don't read it, they have become a nation of biblical illiterates."

He might have said that but he didn't. He could have.

Now hold on to your chair. Less than half of all American believers can name all four gospels, while more than half can name only four (or even fewer) of the Ten Commandments. Seriously. I'm not making this up.

Most Americans (82%, in fact) believe that one of Poor Richard's sacred aphorisms,"God helps those who help themselves," is found somewhere in the book of Proverbs, not in Ben Franklin. Surveys also discovered that lots of folks think Joan of Arc was Noah's wife, and half of all high school seniors believe that Sodom and Gomorrah were a married couple.

But our pastor that Sunday wasn't talking about accumulating Bible knowledge. What wrinkled his forehead was his deep desire to make sure we knew how crucial it is to our lives to know the Holy Scriptures' eternal truths. He was less concerned with whether or not we could list Israel's sad line of kings than that we understand why God really didn't much care for the idea of human kingship from the get-go.

He was preaching an old saw, of course, the genre of sermon that couldn't really go south--like fighting sin and loving Jesus and being kind to your neighbor. You can't go wrong when you tell people they need to know and live the Word; we know; sometimes we just don't do.

It may well have been a class in the works of John Milton of Paradise Lost fame--I don't remember exactly. I was in my first semester of graduate school, I think, doing some secondary reading on the Reformation. My mind leaks info like an old inner tube. I swear I read it back then somewhere but don't have a clue where. I wish I could stick in a footnote here, but I can't. You'll have to take my word.

Somewhere in England, a Protestant government created a law to force every church in the kingdom to turn the pulpit copy of the Holy Bible around, the big one, the grand one, do a full-180 up in front of the congregation so that its face was radically open to the people and not just the priest. 

I would guess that all over the country those huge pulpit Bibles were swung around and opened, not so the congregation's most pious congregants could stroll up front and read mid-worship, but because of what that Bible's open face said--so plainly and fully--in the center of worship. The Bible belongs to the people.

It just so happens that the preacher holding forth on the efficacy of the Word that morning was doing so while standing right behind a huge open Bible blessedly opened to us, to the people, 500 years later. So amazing.

There's so much story in that huge open Bible, so much truth without really turning a page.

Right there in front of all of us was the sermon, open to any of us. Right there, without saying a thing. There it was as it is every Sunday morning, wide open.

Geometry assignment; March 7

We continued working with arcs and central angles today.  We went over the specifics of the arc addition postulate, and how it is different from the segment addition postulate.  We also went through a few examples of problems dealing with central angles, unknown values, and algebraic equations.  The students got started on their homework towards the end of the period.

Assignment:  arcs and central angles worksheet

Algebra 10-12 assignment; May 9

We spent time in class today continuing to work with quadratics and how to solve them.  We also working with what the graphs of quadratics look like and how to draw them once the two solutions for x are solved for.

Assignment:  Solving quadratics worksheet

Algebra 10-12 assignment; 9/9

Today's lesson focused on the beginning of working with various types of equations.  We demonstrated what an open, true, and false equation was.  We then began to work with equations to find the correct solution set.  This involved doing the same thing to both sides of the equations:  add, subtract, multiply, or divide.

The students then got started working on their assignment at the end of the period.


Assignment:  section 1-7;  page 36-37;  #1-36 all

Geometry assignment; 8/26

We went over the course syllabus today as well as several of the classroom expectations.  We checked out books and got started on our first assignment that deals with a quick review of some equation solving skills in algebra.


Assignment:  Solving multi-step equations worksheet

Geometry assignment; April 28

We began chapter 12 today working with 3-D objects.  The new terms that we introduced today involved finding the surface area and volume of various types of prisms.  Each one of these values is a combination of the area calculations that we have been working with in chapter 11.  After going through several sample problems together, the students got started on their homework at the end of the period.


Assignment:  section 12-1;  page 478;  #1-5, 7-11, 13, 14

Geometry assignment; Feb. 3

We went over our chapter 7 test today in class.  We then covered the topics of simplifying radical expressions and factoring our perfect squares.  We will be using this skill quite a bit as we move into chapter 8 dealing with right triangles.


Assignment:  Simplifying radicals worksheet  #1-48 all

Geometry assignment; April 18th

We quickly went over our homework assignment before getting started on the quiz today.  The quiz was over finding the area of regular polygons.

After the quiz, the students got started on their homework assignment.


Assignment:  Determining areas of irregular shapes   #1-6

Remembering Frederick Manfred--1912-1994 (x)

At his burial service up in the cemetery on the hill above Doon, his daughter read a story that was read again, later, at a memorial party he had himself ordered up, a story that later aired on National Public Radio, albeit altered a bit. That story epitomizes the relationship Frederick Manfred maintained with the faith tradition from which he’d come.

You can read it for yourself in his daughter’s memoir, A Daughter Remembers, but I’ll summarize it quickly. When the doctors discovered a rapidly growing brain tumor, Fred was scheduled immediately for surgery. An hour before, a young female hospital chaplain, someone Freya Manfred describes as “wearing a brightly flowered dress with a white lace collar and carrying a small white Bible,” dropped by to see him. Hospital policy.

When she told Fred that she was there to see how he stood spiritually, he immediately asked her about her background. She told him she was Catholic—although only by upbringing; and he told her in no uncertain terms that Roman Catholics had a great history. Do you know it?—he asked. She didn’t. Well, you should, said Manfred, and then, characteristically, began to hold forth on Aquinas and all manner of Roman Catholic history.

When he stopped to catch a breath, she bridged the question again—“But how are you doing spiritually? Perhaps I could guide you along,” she told him, sweetly.

“Have you read much philosophy?” Fred asked her. When she shook her head, he recommended Nietzsche, Wittgenstein, Schopenhauer, Plato.

No reaction.

“What about poetry?” Fred said, booming, I’m sure, and now on a roll.

She shrugged her shoulders. “Maybe I should,” she said.

Manfred created a reading list—“Chaucer, Whitman—and don’t forget Dickinson, my personal favorite,” he told her.

Once again, she tried to broker her mission into the lecture. “I came here to find out what your relationship to God might be,” she said sweetly, stroking her white Bible.

And then Manfred told her that he simply wanted someone else. “My background was Christian Reformed,” he said. “You wouldn’t have one of those Christian Reformed guys right here, would you?”

“You mean a minister?” the young lady said.

Freya quotes him like this: “’No, just anyone who’s raised Christian Reformed. Someone who’s sick here in the hospital like me. Aren’t any of your patients Christian Reformed?”

The woman told her she didn’t think she knew of any, and he told her that if she’d find one to “rustle him up.”

“Rustle him up?” she responded.

“Bring him around here so I can talk to him. I like to argue with those guys—it perks them up,” he said. “Send him over and we’ll talk. It’ll do him some good, and me too.”

That’s a story Fred himself would tell, I’m sure, even embellish a bit, if he could. I feel his own voice in it, in me, as I tell it. I know he’d approve.

Algebra 10-12 assignment; March 27

After reviewing with our last check quiz and entry task, the students took the test on multiplying polynomials today.  After the test they were able to work on an extra credit assignment if they chose to.

Assignment:  none  (extra credit was optional)