BASEBALL AND NOT BASEBALL

If the point of this blog is too let me know when I’ve neglected professional development a bit I think I clearly have.  I have considered writing a new Tiger age post and a new promotion post in the baseball section.  In the not baseball section I have considered writing about projects in Math 115 (College Algebra) and writing I am doing for the Quantway project through the Dana Center.  The in-person games will start soon, too.

I think I need to make this a once a week task again.

Here is a brief summary of the projects in Math 115

• Linear- Tolls on the Ohio Turnpike
• Transformations of Base Functions- Designing a Quadratic Arch (I know this is pseudomath as I should have had the students design a catenary arch.)
• Quadratic- Projectile motion on the moon
• Power Functions- modeling alligator length-weight relationships (From Education Queensland)
• Systems of Equations- I switched to a problem set.  This originally was going to be on balancing equations in chemistry and I have missed days due to illness and Michigan weather so we did not have a day to devote to chemistry background.

In Quantway one of the lessons I wrote dealt with percent increase and decrease by comparing populations between the 2000 and 2010 Censuses.  The south is still growing at a larger absolute rate and the west at a larger percentage rate.  It is not as dramatic as the differences from 1990 to 2000 though. The west has a decent base of population now.  Heck, Nevada only grew 30-some percent and not 60-some percent in the last decade.