New Years Eve

 Happy New Year's Eve.

Resolutions For Math

It's that time of the year again, when most people make their New Years resolutions and about 80 percent of those same people give up by February.  I got to thinking that maybe we can help students learn to use the same criteria for successful goal setting.  I discovered early on that my students can make goals but they haven't learned to figure out how to meet the goal.  For instance, they might say, they want an A in class but they don't know how to do it.

I came across the SMART system for writing resolutions which can also be used to set realistic goals and I think it is something we can introduce our students to so they become more successful.  SMART stands for specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and timely.  

When we say specific, it means to set the goal and be specific about the goal.  Setting the goal of getting an A is not specific but stating they will complete half of all the assigned problems is specific, especially if they seldom turn in any work.  Let them know the goal is what they hope to accomplish and they need to address what challenges they will face, and where they expect to see themselves at the end of the semester or year.  They need to express what the completed goal will look like at the end.

Measurable means stating what criteria is being used to "see" how the person is making progress towards reading the goal.  How will they monitor their progress? If they decided on working towards a C when they struggle with getting a D normally, they can use daily work, quizzes, tests, and any projects to monitor their progress.  

Attainable refers to setting the goal at a level the person can reach and writing down the steps needed to make that goal.  If the goal is to make 70 percent on all assignments which is attainable, the student might then determine the steps are to do all the problems for each assignment, ask for help as needed, be willing to come in after school, and maybe even redo all missed problems.  On the other hand, if a student seldom works, setting a goal for an A may not be attainable so it all depends on the student.

The goal needs to be relevant to the student rather than the teacher.  The student needs to be able to express why the goal is important and what impact it will have on a students life.  The impact might be that it helps them get into collage or it might be the first time the student got a C in a math class.  The reasons have to be student centered and should not be set because their friends are choosing it.  They need to look at their strengths and weakness when they set the goal.  It might be something as simple as memorizing their multiplication table if they don't know it or it might be learning to solve two step equations.

Finally is timely which refers to  setting a time limit and in school, that is set by the length of the semester.   The goal needs to have an ending time so the student might say they want to know their multiplication table by the end of the first semester so they know when the deadline is. Students should also be aware that the time line might consist of a series of deadlines such as knowing all the multiplication facts for ones the first week,  ones and twos by the end of the second week, adding one set each week so by the end of the quarter, they know everything from 1 x 1 to 9 x 9. 

This site offers a view of what a graphic organizer for SMART might look like and it says it offers a free version.  If it is written down, students can revisit them at the end of the year and see if they made their goals.  Let me know what you think, I'd love to hear.  Have a great day. 

New Years Math Fun Facts

 

Today, I decided to look at fun math facts associated with New Years because they can be used to help hook students when we get back to school for spring semester.  For most people, they stay up till midnight, enjoy a glass fo something to ring in the new year.  In addition, you might watch the various new year celebrations that are broadcast beginning on the east coast and follows across the country so you can celebrate more than once.

Have you ever wondered how many times the new year is celebrated around the globe?  When they set up time zones, they wanted to set it up as 24 different zones, each one hour apart but it didn't work out that way.  Instead, many of the countries are half an hour off of other countries, or a country has multiple time zones so it works out that there are 40 different countdowns to ring in the new year.  But what happens if you are on the International Space Station?  Since they are not associated with an earth based time zone, when do they celebrate the new year?

Since the International Space Station is moving all the time, they move fast enough to see sunrise and sunset every 90 minutes which mean they spend about 4 minutes in each time zone. This can make it difficult so they base their time and New Years celebration on Greenwich mean time because the Royal Observatory has been at the center of time keeping for centuries.

Did you know that 45 percent of Americans make resolutions such as loosing weight, giving up smoking, save more, etc but 25 percent of those give up on their resolutions by the second week of January.  So if the population of the United States in 2020 is said to be 329.5 million people, how many people made resolutions and how many quit within two weeks.  According to another fact, 80 percent of people give up on their resolutions by February. 

In addition, Americans open enough champagne to enjoy 360 million glasses of it at the New Years.  If we assume only adults drink the champagne, we know that 258.3 million people of the United States are adults so how many glasses are being drunk per person?  Furthermore, 41 percent of Americans state that New Years eve is their favorite holiday but 3 percent of the population never celebrates it at all.  In addition, 28 percent of people who drink, have food delivered on January first.

We all love watching the ball drop in New York city.  The one they televise every New Years at midnight and all one million people in Times Square celebrate it.  Times Square is said to take up 11,600 square feet  of area so the density of squeezing one million people into it is going to be huge.  Let your students calculate the density of number of people per square feet.  Since it works out to about 86.2 people per square foot, it can open up discussions on how can you get that number of people in such a small space.  This million people leave 56 tons of trash including 1.5 tons of confetti.  This opens up another great problem of figuring out how many pounds of trash are left by each person?

These facts offer teachers a chance to turn percents into actual numbers so students get a more realistic idea of how many are participating in each thing.  Let me know what you think, I'd love to hear.  Have a great day.

The Day After

 The day after

Merry Christmas

 

Happy Christmas Eve

 

Don’t forget to put out the cookies.

Ancient Greek Astronomical Calculator

 

Just imagine if you will, the ancient Greeks were able to create what is considered the world's first analog computer. This happened around 2,000 years ago when they created the Antikythera Mechanism which was a hand powered device used to predict astronomical events.

What is quite fascinating about the device is that it is considered one of the most complex pieces of engineering to survive from so long ago. The ancient Greeks used it to predict the position of the sun, moon, planets, and the lunar and solar eclipses.

This device was found in 1901 by sponge divers in a shipwreck dating back to Roman times, in a location near the island of Antikythera. They found a device made out of bronze with 30 bronze gears used in  complex patterns  to determine astronomical events.

Scientists have studied this device since it was discovered but it wasn't until 2005 they were able to determine how it worked after using three  dimensional x-rays combined with surface imaging to create a better picture of how the mechanisms actually predicted eclipses and how it calculated the motion of the moon.  However, it wasn't until earlier this year that scientists were able to understand how the full gearing system in the front worked because only one third of the mechanism survived but it was split into 82 pieces.

Some of the results from the research done in 2005, revealed thousands of text characters hidden inside the fragments or pieces and the text has not been seen in over 2000 years. They found a description the back cover which had a description of the heavenly display complete with planets moving along rings represented by marker beads.  In addition, the largest fragment, Fragment A, showed the features of the bearings, pillars, and blocks while another large fragment, Fragment D, showed a disk, a 63 tooth gear and plate. 

A group of people from UCL in London relied on the description on the back cover to recreate the display.  They also relied on the numbers 462 and 442 from the front cover which seem to represent the planetary cycles for Venus and Saturn and these numbers were quite accurate especially since the classic astronomy of the first 1000 years BC originated in Babylon and there is a question as to how the ancient Greeks, arrived at the accurate values for Venus and Saturn.

So the team used an ancient mathematical method used by the Greeks to derive the length of cycles of Venus and Saturn, and also managed to determine the cycles of all the other planets.  The method was described by philosopher Parmendies with enough detail, the team could use it. Furthermore, they took the evidence from Fragment A and Fragment D to the 462 year cycle for Venus and the 63 tooth gear and plate played an important roll in this.

This lead the team to creating a mechanism for each planet that could be used to calculate new advanced astronomical cycles while minimizing the number of gears in the whole system. This has helped science move one step further to fully understanding the device.  Isn't this impressive?  A device that accurately calculated astronomical entities?  Let me know what you think, I'd love to hear.  Have a great day.