Hang in there - we're nearly to the end of the semester

It's that time of year again when people start thinking about time off work and school and looking forward to some parties and some rest. Some of you don't get any extra time off if you are junior at your job or you are struggling to earn a living. Hang in there either way.

What have we done lately in school? We just completed a short unit (3 days) on measurement and decorating a room. We learned how to convert measurements from Imperial to Imperial, Metric to Metric, and the tough one, Metric to Imperial and back again. I gave out a pair of handouts that contained two important charts and I had everyone add a "Metric Ladder" to the mix. The Metric Ladder is posted in the front of the classroom above my desk and quite high up. After doing some basic converting I showed the basics of measuring a room and planning for painting, laying of baseboards and carpeting. All concepts are either related to area or perimeter. There was an in-class assignment giving the dimensions of a room in a variety of units (ex. 8', 11'3", 5.02 m, etc.) and a price list of materials. These were given in lineal feet, sq. ft, and feet. It was your job to determine what the total cost of the job would be given the dimensions of the room and the cost of the materials.

We also finished an old unit on Wednesday - the statistics unit. In the first half of the night we learned some cool things about the standard normal curve and applied that to our penny mass activity. In the second half we did some graphing using scatter plots and the title of the lesson was Correlation Coefficient. That's just a number that ranges from -1 to 1. Actually there is a very complicated formula to calculate this value but that is not our purpose in Consumer Math. We are, however, getting to know reasonable approximations. The numbers -1, 0, and 1 are critical. Also being able to recognize if a line is very strong positive, weak negative, weak positive etc. was an important part of the lesson. Try your best to get to the next class if you missed.
My next video is nearly ready to go online. Again, it's a basic arithmetic lesson on fractions - reducing them in particular. My first two videos were too casual, although they will work for someone who needs to have a basic measurement lesson and who doesn't mind the middle-aged teacher-on-his-day-off look. They cover day 1 of the aforementioned 3 day unit. I dressed up for this one. Thanks, Kevin, for putting up with me as I try to get with the times and get online. Kevin is my youngest son and does the filming of these video lessons.

Stay in touch either by e-mail or commenting on this site. As long as you let me know what's going on I'll be able to keep you in mind and I won't even consider letting you risk losing this credit. Show me that you mean business no matter what your circumstances and one way or another we'll make it work. You may not get the credit in January, but I'm sure late is better than never.

Take care of yourself and thanks for dropping by.

Joe