My YAFIYGI Life, Continued

[omorka]

I got my official tentative assignment for next year today.

2 sections AP Statistics, 3 sections Pre-AP Precalculus, 1 section on-level Precalculus.

Go look at my post for November 25th. I'll wait.

Off by one section, in my favor yet. Not bad, ne?

You Asked For It . . .

I gave the full hypercube talk to 3A today. The kid who plays the French Horn spent about an hour early this week just dumping to me about his life issues. The ADHD Kid is considering not ditching my Alg. II exam, despite the fact that he's failing badly and would have to ace the exam to pass, because I gave him The Eye of Death. I told all my kids they'd have to suffer through another year of me next year and they cheered, by the gods!

At the ritual at the pseudo-3G retreat in August, I asked to be able to be myself with my kids, to be able to develop the personal relationships with them I needed to really teach them, despite all my closets.

. . . You Got It.

I suspect - I don't know, but I feel - I have one more left. "You can't get what you want 'till you know what you want." I have to be very careful what I articulate. Loosely, I know which of two things I will need to set out - working towards Initiation and hammering out this relationship mess into a shape everyone involved is happy with. Either one will involve dominoing other people into my issues. Not that the above two didn't . . . but in the first one, Mr. H and Ms. S had already decided they were going, and Mrs. B's decision to go to Taylor was of her own free will, not for anything I did. In the second, I hadn't even met my kids yet - and that was mostly a change in myself. These involve (at the very least) the entire coven, on the one hand, and the Spouse and One Other Person Who I Am Trying Very Hard Not To Make A Specific Person on the other.

I'm being careful what I wish for.

Comments

[bassfingers.livejournal.com]

Hypercube talk, eh? Any interested parties? Back in 1994 I was chatting via email with geometrist Jeff Weeks and he sent me the following:

If you want to continue developing your 4-D visualization skills, here are a couple exercises to try.

Exercise #1. If you color the corners of a 3-D cube alternately red and blue, and take the convex hull of the red corners, you get a tetrahedron. Describe the hypersolid you obtain by doing the same construction in a 4-D cube.

Exercise #2. Consider a checkerboard tiling of the Euclidean plane by black and white squares. Cut each white square along both its diagonals to divide it into four small triangles, and annex each small triangle to the nearest black square. This gives you back a tiling of the plane by squares (but the squares have twice the area and are tilted at 45 degrees relative to the original tiling). Nothing too exciting here.

Do the same experiment in 3-D. What do you get? Are the tiles regular polyhedra? (Platonic solids)

Do the same experiment in 4-D. Describe the tiles. Are they regular hyperpolyhedra?

I spent a fair amount of time on #1, determining the 16-cell it generated had 24 edges, 32 triangular faces and contained 16 regular tetrahedra. I guess, technically speaking, it is a dual of a hypercube and can be described as a Regular Four-Dimensional Polytope, according to Wells (http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0140118136/phui/).

[bassfingers.livejournal.com]

Since I hadn't checked up on him in a while, I found Jeff Weeks' current site, Geometry Games (http://www.geometrygames.org/). Some nice stuff, like mazes on klein bottle surfaces...

[omorka.livejournal.com]

I've got a group of 4-5 kids in that class who are into "weird physics" in general. I'm trying to spur interests in chaos theory and hypergeometry, in particular, in them - and steer them into the cool physics guy's astronomy class.

This stuff is a little heady for them this year - they've just started, after all. I'll keep noodging them in that direction next year, and we'll see what happens . . . we might try 4D tic-tac-toe if they maintain interest.