Math and More Math

August 31, 2011

Wednesday finally felt like a normal routine. I got up, grabbed my fruit/veggie smoothie and headed up to the free ruins. I am planning on climbing them once a day until I am in great shape. Needless to say day 1 wasn’t pretty. I had to stop several times during the 800 foot hike up.

After that I headed down for Spanish lessons with Maria. We walked around town a little and I suppose conversation was a little easier. I decided that I wanted to find another place to eat so I didn’t go to the same place every day. I stopped in a little restaurant we went to last year with Rustic kids. They had the same menu type option but for $1.80. Nice.

I made it to tutoring around 3:30 and several of the second year girls were waiting patiently for me. They had a bunch of homework. I first helped Yessica learn the properties of real numbers. I am quickly learning the vocab in Spanish, but sometimes I still have to check in the book for what to say. Next up was Dena. I couldn’t believe it, she had the assignment involving solving a system of three equations. This is the longest and most tedious one I give to my Algebra 2 students every year. They always come back the next day hating me for how long it took to finish. Well, she did a great job but it took almost 3 hours to do all 7 problems by hand. I don’t think they are going to use matrices to solve them. Here is an example:

2x + 3y – 4z = -16

x – 2y + z = 8

-x – 4y + 3z = 16

Hmmm… since there won’t be any exciting motorcycle stories for a while, how about the first person to email me with the correct answers for x, y, and z gets a shout-out in the blog? (Yes, I'm a dork, I know.)

Now is a good time to introduce the girls! Here are links.

These are the second year girls: http://sacredvalleyproject.org/who-we-are/meet-the-girls/

These are the first year girls: http://sacredvalleyproject.org/2011/08/meet-the-girls/

I left around 7:30, only to head over to the corner store in the plaza. Beatriz works there, and I know her from summers of buying water for Rustic students at the store. Well, Tuesday I had the math textbook and I joked if she wanted to study math. She said she actually could really use some help. So I offered! I got to the store around 8 and we worked on some tough mixed fraction, complicated denominator, addition and subtraction problems. It seems like almost everyone I meet around here and tell about what I am doing needs help in math. I may extend my services to others around town. We will see how time goes.