I remembered to take photos this month. Yay. Most of the day was taken up with an all-day professional learning session for teachers on algebra and it finished up with Scouts and then dinner. In short, it was a rather miscellaneous sort of day and the photos reflect that.
It did, however, begin with a lovely sunrise, and the good thing about it is that it occurred a minute earlier than yesterday’s. I love the return of longer days as we move into spring.
The professional learning session was being conducted off-campus, near the Hobart Rivulet. Before things began I just had time to take a photo of the winter-denuded trees along the banks of the creek, and another of the sunlit newly-budding trees near the car-park.
You’d want to attend a day on building algebra understanding, wouldn’t you?
We looked at a nice problem about trying to calculate how many little cubes of different colours there are that make up the cube below, and then they had to generalise it for bigger and bigger cubes (there are blue cubes on the inside).
When I arrived back at the office around 3:45pm, it was to face the ominous task of the day’s influx of emails. Blerch.
That’s why I needed chocolate. Well, probably I didn’t. But I thought I did.
At least there were some pretty sunset clouds out the window just before I left the office, with the good thing about this particular sunset being that it occurred a minute later than yesterday’s.
One of the things that I was reminded of during the course of the day is that my backpack is dying. I am torturing the poor thing, I confess, but it started falling apart before I started abusing it.
I do have a new one … I just haven’t had time to organise the clean up and transfer.
As soon as I arrived home, I changed into my Scout uniform and headed off (one of the older Scouts was leading most of the program to finish off some badgework).
And when I finally arrived home at 9:30 it was time for dinner, if you call four steamed dim sims and a corn cob “dinner” (on Wednesday nights I sometimes do).
(The “12 of 12” project involves taking 12 photos on the 12th of the month. This provides the opportunity to get snapshots of different aspects of your life. I have been doing this since 2009.)
In a fit of midnight maths, I couldn’t resist your cube puzzle. How’s this:
Where L is the length of the cube, measured in smaller cubes:
Red = 8
Green = 12(L – 2)
Yellow = 6(L – 2)^2
Blue = (L – 2)^3
And in answer to your question: Yes, I’d be interested in attending a day in algebra understanding :-)!
Go to the top of the class. (I found it more than a little scary that some of the folk who are teaching secondary school maths struggled with this.)