Yes, but when can I sleep in?

Oy. The quarter ended officially yesterday and I have finally come up for air. I say 'officially' because I believe the last thing of any value that occurred in any of my classes took place days—if not weeks—earlier, yet classes kept meeting. Spring quarter is brutal. I have a sense now of how marathon runners feel: once your legs go numb, your feet move out of habit. Well, my head has been numb for quite a while. My lips kept moving.

A sense of how bad things had gotten as we slogged toward the end was when, after a full 7 or 8 weeks into the class, I was still being asked a question that was foremost in the students minds: how many decimals should we round our answers to? I cannot tell you how low on the list of Big Ideas this issue is yet how high it is on the list of Things Asked Today. For the students to feel that the number of decimal places is a Big Idea means that they are missing the truly Big Ideas. For example, if you have just calculated when a water balloon launched from the roof of a 120-foot high platform is going to hit your younger sibling in the head, taking into account initial velocity and initial height while the variables that can really screw things up are mysteriously ignored and absent from the formula, why are you obsessing over the hundredths place versus the thousandths place?

I would much rather the question be something along the lines of "does launch angle matter" or "will it go farther if initial velocity is increased while height is decreased or vice-versa"? But no. Faith in the formula without understanding the elements of said formula trumps all and the fundamentalists do not question the legitimacy of what they have been told. They instead sweep the formula under the rug and obsess over the stem-cell of the math world: decimal place. I contend that this question would take care of itself if the scenario were considered a little more deeply. If you round to the hundredths place or the thousandths place, does not your sibling still get wet?


Ug. Apparently I'm still a little wound up. And I have 3 full inches of grading to get through between today and tomorrow. And today is graduation. Yea. I do like graduation around these parts. This is an area in which getting a degree is not the expected norm and is still an achievement that needs to be properly honored. These students are truly proud of themselves for their educational accomplishments, as are their families. It is not assumed that everyone will ever have a degree around here. Graduation is not merely a task included in my job description. It is a rite of passage that I am happy to be a part of. So, I'm off to grade a little, then don the robes of the academic mucky-muck, and then do something to help me reboot like mow the lawn and whack some weeds.