Sports and Math

Sports and Math......do they go together? I noticed that my blog has been a lot about sports (especially the redsox) and I was wondering if you think that math and sports are connected. I took a tour of the Patriots Hall of Fame Wednesday morning and that has me thinking even more about the connection between math and sports. The Hall of fame has a lot of educational things in it. When the kicker is attempting a field goal do you think he is thinking about the math involved? Well he should be. Do you have any idea what the percent of increase is on ticket prices and the programs sold at each game? What about the all the statistics kept on these professional players. I am sure there is a mathematician involved, specifically a statistician. So what do you think about the sports and math connection?

Where does the time go?

When you have a long weekend, do you ever think "This is great. I'll spend this time catching up"? When I left school on Friday I was so excited to have a three day weekend. I thought I could have the extra time to get caught up on things. Well it is already Monday and I have not done one thing that I thought I would do. I wanted to get caught up on some correcting and make some extra practice sheets to post on edline. I also needed to get some things done around my house. None of that got done. Saturday My daughter had a double header for marching band competitions so there was a 1:00 show in Dartmouth and a 6pm show in New Bedford. I am happy to report that her school, King Philip, won both competitions. When I arrived home Saturday night I stayed up to watch the late Red Sox game. Depressing that we lost, but I’ll get over it. Then Sunday my son had a baseball game, which his team won. They are 5-1 overall this fall. When I got home from that I did manage to do one thing around the house, but no school work. Now it is Monday and I am leaving here in about 3 hours to go into Boston. I have tickets to todays game at 4:30. I’m very excited to be going to a playoff game! So much for me catching up on things this weekend.

Technology in the classroom

I went to Bridgewater State College today to listen to Mr. Alan November speak about learning in the 21st century. Now I am all excited about trying new things in my math class. I have set up a custom search engine on google to help search specifically for web sites that will help explain precalculus topics. I am going to ask all my students to contribute web sites to this search engine. I have also set up an account with jingproject.com so we will be making videos at the end of each class to summarize the key topics we covered that day. The videos will then be posted on the internet for all to view. Each day I am hoping to have a different student volunteer to make the summary video, or maybe I will pick students at random. I know the class is going to enjoy doing this. My next project is going to be on epals.com. I hope to find a math teacher in a different country that wants to have contact with us. We can start communications between the two classes and use skype to have ongoing communication between our students. I am very excited about trying these new activities in class. I hope I can get you just as excited as I am.

Its all about sports

What a week! The Norton football team is going to have a great game Friday night and put on a show for Fox 25 and all the viewers, The RedSox won their first playoff game in California, and my sons fall baseball team is undefeated with only 3 games left to play.

Did anyone stay up late last night to watch the redsox game? I don't know why I felt it necessary to stay up that late on a school night. Now, today I am tired and will probably be cranky. I will have to come home from school and take a nap at 3:00. Oh well, at least the sox won and I did get 4.5 hours of sleep.