Loooong week.

I swear it should be January by now.  This week has taken forever to get through!

Kind of a weird day today.  They held a breakfast during first period today for all of the kids who are "Anderson Achievers", which means their gpa is above a certain value, they are involved in school activities, and they have no discipline referrals - basically all of my precalc kids.  I had 8 kids left in a class of 30 and that was because they forgot to turn their application forms in.  We had a quiz yesterday over graphing trig functions and I didn't want to start anything new without the majority of them here, yet I have 2 more precalc classes later in the day to deal with.  I refuse to bow to the pressure of the "Freeday Friday Funday" (which seems to be a staple at our junior high) and was searching for something to do.

Here's what I ended up with. It uses the idea of a person's biorhythms to create sine curves showing their cycles of intelligence, physicality, and emotion.  We had a discussion about this being only a theory (so it's not something you'd bank on) but the kids enjoyed plotting the sine curves to determine their "high" and "critical" days.  (There are gobs of them online if you want to check them out.)

A couple of comments:
1.  One girl said her dad had had a long talk with her about this - she was skeptical (thank goodness) but was excited to show him what we'd done when she got home.

2.  Had a lot of discussion amongst the girls about the emotional cycle (28 days) matching their periods. (And by that I mean their periods.)  Oh, the things they'll talk about.


Had a quiz today in Algebra 1 about solving systems by graphing and using substitution. We've been working on this all week and everyone seemed fine.  Until they got in class today and did the typical pre-quiz freakout. I'm seriously tired of that one!  I posted all of the worked out answers on the class blog last night and I'm guessing maybe 1 girl actually checked her answers on it.  The others decided to wait until today to check in class.... and then of course had questions.  Sometimes I wonder why I do the extra work!  Just hoping that it helped out that one girl.

I got a new student in Alg1 this week. A move in. From China.  Who speaks no English.  She's 17 and I'm sure has taken this level of class before, but because of the language issue they didn't want to start her in anything higher.  We've exchanged "hi"s and when I said "How are you?" she stared blankly at me.  Poor thing.  Had a discussion with the kids about how isolated she must be feeling; they're being extra-nice to her... or at least as much as they can be!

Introduced imaginary numbers in Algebra 2 today. I'm guessing that 7th period on a Friday wasn't the best time for that; they were pretty much freaking out and in major resistance mode.  Monday should be fun. (Not.) We didn't get to the idea of using the conjugate to simplify fractions, which is probably a good thing.

Lots of grading to do this weekend; precalc graphing quizzes from yesterday and Algebra 1 quizzes from today.  I'm totally graded out - having 90+ precalc kids kills me when I grade assignments.  I just finished up their temperature regression equations from last week and a sine/cos graphing applications packet that was due on Monday. And now the quizzes. Ugh.

8 days until Christmas break!  Hope I make it.