Three Things Make A Post
Jun. 19th, 2019 04:10 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
omorkaSo james gave me: Tropical fruit, Squares, Hurdy gurdy. *rubs hands*
1) Tropical Fruit: One of the interesting things about Houstopolis is that, being semitropical and near a large warm blob of ocean, quite a few tropical plants will grow here with some minimal winter protection during the one week a year it actually freezes (especially in the central city's heat dome). Banana plants are actually kind of invasive. I keep getting tempted by the actual tropical fruit trees at the annual Urban Harvest and then contemplating when those freeze-danger weeks are and how busy I usually am with both school and Owlcon prep then. (Citrus aren't strictly tropical. They don't count.)
I have successfully grown pineapples indoors before, but my last couple of attempts have succumbed to root rot before blooming.
2) Squares: Quadratics give my kiddos way more trouble than I expect, every time they come up, and I'm never quite sure why. My best guess is that they're taught in complete isolation in Algebra 1 and the kiddos never quite realize how connected they are to everything they learn afterwards (especially, but not exclusively, rational functions). By the time they get to trig and calculus, this is a real problem. Last school year, I made the conscious decision to pull u-substitution down into Precal and start rewriting some of the exponential and trigonometric equations that required quadratics to solve explicitly in the u-form, to make the u-squared part as plain as I could make it. This seemed to help, so I'm going to keep doing it; it also resulted in a couple of students shouting "stealth quadratics!" every time they appeared, followed by groans from the other students.
3) Hurdy gurdy: The Beloved owns one of these; he bought it from another musician who never played it and was selling it off cheap. I've heard him play it all of twice. I think he only uses it when the piece they're playing would usually require a bagpipe but an actual one would just blow everyone off the stage (for those just joining in, the Beloved plays in a Celtic band that does a lot of very traditional tunes). Both he and I are vaguely fascinated by the nykelharpa, which has the same tangent system for pseudo-fretting, but requires that you bow it instead of turning the wheel to vibrate the strings.
Comment and I'll give you three things to talk about!
james gave me: Tropical fruit, Squares, Hurdy gurdy. *rubs hands*1) Tropical Fruit: One of the interesting things about Houstopolis is that, being semitropical and near a large warm blob of ocean, quite a few tropical plants will grow here with some minimal winter protection during the one week a year it actually freezes (especially in the central city's heat dome). Banana plants are actually kind of invasive. I keep getting tempted by the actual tropical fruit trees at the annual Urban Harvest and then contemplating when those freeze-danger weeks are and how busy I usually am with both school and Owlcon prep then. (Citrus aren't strictly tropical. They don't count.)
I have successfully grown pineapples indoors before, but my last couple of attempts have succumbed to root rot before blooming.
2) Squares: Quadratics give my kiddos way more trouble than I expect, every time they come up, and I'm never quite sure why. My best guess is that they're taught in complete isolation in Algebra 1 and the kiddos never quite realize how connected they are to everything they learn afterwards (especially, but not exclusively, rational functions). By the time they get to trig and calculus, this is a real problem. Last school year, I made the conscious decision to pull u-substitution down into Precal and start rewriting some of the exponential and trigonometric equations that required quadratics to solve explicitly in the u-form, to make the u-squared part as plain as I could make it. This seemed to help, so I'm going to keep doing it; it also resulted in a couple of students shouting "stealth quadratics!" every time they appeared, followed by groans from the other students.
3) Hurdy gurdy: The Beloved owns one of these; he bought it from another musician who never played it and was selling it off cheap. I've heard him play it all of twice. I think he only uses it when the piece they're playing would usually require a bagpipe but an actual one would just blow everyone off the stage (for those just joining in, the Beloved plays in a Celtic band that does a lot of very traditional tunes). Both he and I are vaguely fascinated by the nykelharpa, which has the same tangent system for pseudo-fretting, but requires that you bow it instead of turning the wheel to vibrate the strings.
Comment and I'll give you three things to talk about!
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Date: 2019-06-19 09:39 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-06-20 12:55 am (UTC)