Cool Show Moments ~ Kepler Poinsot Polyhedra and young super fans

Photo by fdecomite

The man enters my booth making it clear he was not shopping this year, but also saying how much he loves the three trivets he has purchased at the Kimberton Waldorf Show.  

So I say, "How was your year?"

Fifteen minutes later and after a few google image searches, I have become educated in the realm of the Kepler Poinsot Polyhedra.  He has spent the year constructing models and being drawn into mathematical beauty of them.  He apologizes for"boring me," but I reassure him that I love math, design, science, and history of such things.  Yes, this is the Kepler you hopefully learned about in Earth Science classes.  The man that came up with laws of planetary motion.

Later the very young man I celebrated two years ago came back for the third straight year to buy a suncatcher.  Clearly our youngest super~fan.

and with that our 2012 show season has come to an end.  We have commissions to finish and our etsy shop is open, feel free to browse.

My students desired to do something completely different... Science Mondays

Asian eggplants are the ones in the front


One of the first rules for teaching is to understand that your students may just be even more groggy than you are on a Monday morning.

This summer I am teaching math for the first time in over a decade. Most of the students have had some algebra so we have been reviewing some skills to keep them in good working order when their regular teacher returns in the fall.

This morning I asked them if they wanted to do some algebra or to do something completely different. By the end of the class we were almost ready to figure out the density of an Asian eggplant.

I pulled eleven recently harvested eggplants out of the fridge and drew a chart using a garden marker... Length, circumference, and weight were measured.

We then manipulated c=2 pi r to determine the radius. Then we headed towards the formula of the volume of a cylinder, which led to a discussion between the difference between volume and density, which they understood as the time for lunch arrived.

Maybe next Sunday I will update this post with the results of the density calculations. Yesterday I updated about a friend, a fire victim, and a food issue.

Science Mondays... Fuzzy Logic and Craft Shows

Three days a week, students enter my classroom after lunch, at which point I tell them some things about the history of science and then give them time to read silently.

Last Thursday they requested a game of hangman, and I nearly won by using Fuzzy Logic.

In 1965 Lotfi A. Zadeh played with numbers and much has happened since with what mathematicians call fuzzy logic. The short paragraph of the book I am reading said that before his work computers could only do yes or no. And as we know life just isn't that simple.

Mosaic Woman and I will consider doing a craft show. I swear we make it as simple as, is the weekend free? Yes, we do it.

It was nearing 5pm on Sunday and it was time to pack up. It is a mindful time and I enjoy how we don't rush. Plenty of time to stop by the flag poll to joke with new friends, who are staying out of the way of another new friend who is also packing.

But on this night parameters started setting in...

hmmm we will be done packing around 6:30, over two hour drive home, no dinner yet. We don't even consider what I knew, there would be a ton of cars headed home after a weekend in the Poconos and what we didn't know... there was a bad accident farther south. And now I start thinking about an 8 am staff meeting and unpacking a car late at night.

maybe it is best if we just look at the calender and say, "Yes, we can do that show."

interested on the man and his math...