Mr. Heise
Changing of the Seasons
We had a very nice week both in and out of class. The changing of the seasons is in full swing. This week, I ran up from Park City and linked up to the Brighton Skyline across Big Cottonwood to drop down into Little Cottonwood, greeted all the time by the billions of flickering gold leaves on Aspens making their transition to winter. Academic study has its seasons too—and now that students are in a good routine of doing work, turning it in, and revising—I'm reminded that we can move into our next season of hands-on application and working on some projects that integrate the rote memorization with more open-ended lateral thinking.
Algebra 1 moves into our graphing bloc where we look at linear functions. Students are finding a phenomenon that exhibits linear growth with some variable and collecting data on it for this unit's project. I also have a homework project of my own as I crack open the terminal and set up Raspberry Pi mini computers for our ALP projects this semester. (I forgot that coding is 10% coding and 90% troubleshooting by googling and watching youtube tutorials. But I'm having a great time doing this with a coffee on the deck while the weather's still nice!)
Latin has so far been just me and the students writing, reading and conversing. But we're firing up the TV's and speakers this week and will start listening to spoken Latin dialogue to hone our pronunciation and aural learning modalities. I think the students will enjoy this and appreciate the fact that they can use their new language capabilities to figure out what someone other than Mr. Heise is saying.