Our elementary school celebrated 100th Day, which is the 100th day of school, and an excuse for kids to do projects that give them a sense of what a hundred means (collect 100 stickers, write 100 words, etc). That was a couple of weeks ago--today was my 100th Day. That is, today I ran my 100th mile in 2013. For some comparison, last year's 100th mile was in June!
I also ran my longest short run (that is, the longest run ever that was not a long run) of 4 miles. Actually, the GPS gave me 3.99, but screw it. I ran 4 miles!
This week, I've been teaching the kids to calculate the force of gravity (F=Gmm/r2), which requires them to use scientific notation and graphing calculators. They have experience with scientific notation, in that they understand what it is, but they have never seen graphing calculators before. This resulted Monday's lesson carrying through today, and still without a terribly satisfying conclusion. About 1/3 of the kids are really comfortable with the calculations, 1/3 can do it with some prompting, and 1/3 are lost and cranky. Not the way I like to end a lesson. Fortunately, tomorrow is another day of practice.
Next year, I will have a whole day of calculator familiarizing. We'll start with simple operations, then an introduction to entering scientific notation. Then, we can manipulate some exponential expressions, and move up from there. The best part about teaching is that there's always tomorrow, and next week, and next year.
(Fun fact: I just learned on Wikipedia that the reason calculators use "EE" to signify exponential notation is because they want an "E", but don't want it confused with "e". I understood that, did you?)
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