Tuesday, April 22, 2008

Those moments that bring a tear to a teacher's eye

So yesterday was a typical school day. Just reviewing for the students' upcoming test. I told all my classes that if they come to tutoring after school today, I would give them 10 points of extra credit on their test. Now I know this may seem ridiculous to those of you that graduated from Rochester Adams or teach at a school where majority of your kids graduate, at my school I would predict that 4 out of my 100 kids show up. To my surprise though, 10 students came! As tutoring came to an end, one of my students showed me that his calculator was giving him different answers than what I told him. This is quite common with calculators, he had it in radian mode instead of degree. So I showed him how to fix it and asked him he would like to know why his calculator does that? So I started out by writing on the board pi/2 = 90 degrees. I had him punch it in his calculator in the different modes to show him that it gave him the same answer "What the hell!" he exclaimed. Which as a teacher, is music to my ears. So I should him how radians were related to circles and degrees, etc.... When it clicked (which was rather quick) he says to me "That's awesome! See that's why I love math, you start at point A which is actually point B and work your way around it until you get back to the same spot. You just changed my entire career path, I want to be a math professor at a university."

I went home after school and completed a little more than a 7 mile run. I felt really good buy my pace was still above 7 minutes a mile. So I just checked online and found out that according to "Jack Daniels PHD", that actually converts to a 6:51. Thank god. I knew that altitude had an affect on running, but not that drastic. So I guess I'm actually in pretty good running shape out here.

So today we're having the "West Cup" during lunch. It's a 4v4 soccer tournament that fund raises for the school. And happily, I get to play on the team I sponsor. We won today like 6-0 and I had a blast. I almost forgot how much I love this sport. I'm going to try and join a club team out here this summer (or in Rochester) depending on where I may be. Well time to get back to work...

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