LAW OF THE DONUT

oh ... right ... "two halves make a whole" ... har de fucking har

thanks a lot. by the way, we are using that for 10th graders.

special 10th graders? looks like 4th grade

well ... i don't know you harbl, but what i've come to realize as a teacher is that people like myself (bookish, attended grad school like most of family, drawn to messageboards like ilx, do puzzles for fun) are much more "special" (in the sense of outside of average) than i ever thought.

no i know i have volunteered in schools and stuff and you are right. i was just being a jerk. actually i had a hard time getting used to teaching kids things and was frustrated at first, like "what? i can't remember ever not knowing this." i did have to remind myself i was the special one. i don't think i could do that every day.

don't feel bad, that happens to *everyone*. it is called "the expert blind spot". the ultimate irony of teaching is that whereas the majority of people are actually not very good at school, and learn much better in hands-on or on-the-job situations, the majority of teachers tend to be people who are very good at book learning and tend to have good associations with school.

I actually solved all that coz there seemed to be one extra space after i put first A of halves in place (four dud answers corresponding to the spaces between words)

wait though, fractions are like... elementary, no? i mean, my cousin is in 8th grade and doing algebra. why is this for 10th graders?

these 10th graders are doing algebra too, but they still suck at fractions.

a lot of my current kids were homeschooled or attended alternative elementary schools and they're not always totally strong on the fundamentals. (i teach at a liberal arts charter high school with an emphasis on arts)

hmmm... i get the home schooling excuse but the 'alternative' or 'we are focused on arts' thing makes me worry. i went to an arts high school half days but was still expected to get all the regular curriculum mastered in the other half of my days at a normal school. and this was in the shittiest education system in the country (sc). i guess i am just worried that 'oh they suck at fractions because they are more focused on arts' is fodder for people who do not want to fund the arts when, in fact, arts (esp music) and math really compliment each other in terms of cognitive development.

believe me, that's the idea behind our school. but if my kids can't do fractions, i gotta give em fraction worksheets.

i mean, this isn't the curriculum. right now my kids are building a casino that the rest of the school is going to gamble in; they're figuring all of the probabilities for their games and building payoff matrixes and i'm grading them based on whether they can create games with a particular expectation value. the test is going to be how close they get within that expectation value. this is the same real math that other 10th graders are doing, and then some. next they're learning sines and cosines and applying them to rotations to build escher-style tessellations, and then they're going to use all of the area, angle and volume stuff they've done all year to design cost-effective houses for developing nations in sketchup.

but for the five or six kids out of my 48 who can't do fractions, well, they gotta do their worksheets.

i mean, they're doing everything else, plus the worksheets

Do they get a donut once they figure out fractions?

(You know actually lots & lost of grownups do not understand fractions.)

ok i feel a little better now but your initial statement had me really worried!!!!
xpost

http://gazettextra.com/news/2009/apr/30/walworth-county-cop-wins-doughnut-eating-world-tit/

what famous rule of doughnuts...

famous?!

There is some advanced math thing that is described via donuts ... I forget what it was, but my first boyfriend in college explained it to me once.

The torus?

oh yes i remember the torus

Yes! The torus!

the torus?