It's another cold day in January. Thankfully, we are actually at school, for the entire day today. As much as the kids have enjoyed the delays and cancellations early on, those days seemed short, and the it seemed like our pace (work wise) didn't slacken much. It also threw a wrench in the works when it came to play practice. None the less, here we are hoping the nasty weather has passed.

Consumer Math has been working with clothing costs, discounts, sales, and so on. This brought out some fun, personal stories.

Pre-Calculus has been working on vectors and parametric equations. There is a lot of application here when it comes to forces. Think of bridges, buildings, planes, and cars. These are all made with the thought of forces in mind. What kinds of forces will they have to face, and how strong are those forces? Wind, precipitation, the weight of vehicles, and the weight of people are just a few of the many forces that need to be considered. These forces can be broken down into distinct numbers and put into the form of vectors. It's heaven to an engineer!

One of my Algebra II classes has been working on unit multipliers and metric conversions. So, they might have to find out how many dekameters 3 kilometers is. They aren't working exclusively in the metric system, so they might also be asked to convert 40 square feet to square inches. It may all seem pointless to them, but there comes a time when converting from kilometers per hour to miles per hour might be handy. They might also want to convert from feet per second to miles per hour or vice versa in certain situations just so everything makes sense.

Algebra 1/2 has been working with ratio boxes and equations. It's good to know how to do both. Sometimes, application of this isn't evident. However, what if you saw a receipt from a restaurant for $11.40. You know this includes a 18% tip of the meal cost, and a 7% tax of the meal cost. The question is, how much was their meal before the tip and tax? If you want to know, ask me.