no standardized tests left!

So last weekend was a milestone of sorts...

After 5 multi-sport races in the last six weekends, I have none now until June! I did a half marathon last weekend and while my time of 2:02 wasn't great/didn't hit my goal, proportionately how many people can say they did a half marathon then hopped in a car and went to another triathlon festival (wildflower)? and i wasn't sore today! Tomorrow morning i may try for six miles, depends on how long it takes for my sheets to get dry/me to get to bed. i may just bust out the sleeping bag cuz i'm getting tired and want to go to bed before 11...

Well Standardized Tests finished last week, as well as the swim season! So without swimming this week I have an extra 15 hours or so which is cool. today i cleaned my apartment, and cooked a great salmon, green pasta, and strawberries(!) dinner with milk. a full meal on a weeknight... probably a first for me! but i also wasted a lot of time...

i was going to take a picture but a type of emergency came up so i had to go. then Triathlon club meeting (for Fresno State) and then home to clean some more and talk to the girlfriend for a bit :-)

Today we did a great problem experiment that went something like this:

Sale price of grain: $10 per cubit ft.
you have a 30x30 plot of land to build a grain silo on. Assume you will sell all of your grain at the maximum price. For this problem, you are only talking about the FIRST year.

You have four options on how to build your silo:
1) Rectangular prism: Cost is $100,000
2) Cylinder: cost is $90,000
3) Cone - 60,000
4) Pyramid: $50,000

(they could have figured out surface area and all that cost stuff, but i wanted this problem to get done in one day.) overall there were some kids that really understand it and were into it - and turned in some GREAT looking papers, but by and large the kids got confused because hey, they had to use their brains and re-frame the problem and do the work, etc... no one was telling them the radius was 15 ft, etc.

I was going to give them bookwork tomorrow (as evidenced on the website, mrdorman.com) but i think i may give them another performance-based task like that tomorrow. i mean they ahve the formulas already and know how to plug and chug... it's good for them to be confused sometimes!