Friday, October 19th, 2007

Sorry, I forgot to scribe right away on Friday so I did it today. This blog is for Friday, October 19, 2007.

Yesterday was block 2 and we planned on going through the questions on page A-6, #9 on Jane's Garden. But first we talked about Chev's blog from our previous class.

- We started doing the questions on Jane's Garden, but Duchesne had asked Mr. Max a question. "Why is Pre-Calc considered the better class if you learn the Applied way and the Pre-Calc way of solving problems using the technology in the Applied course?" Little did we know that it would take up the whole period to have this discussion.

- Mr. Max gave us his opinion on why he thinks Pre-Calculus is considered the better course. He told us that he thinks it is because Pre-Calculus is the harder type of math and that nobody can skim through it with no problems; there are a few people but not very many in the world. Mr. Max said that choosing between the two math courses just seperates the math students from eachother. It seperates them into two groups-- the ones who want it bad enough they are willing to do up to two hours of homework everynight and the ones who know what they are doing later in life and if it doesn't involve pre-calculus they won't take it.

- He later on told us that he thinks that each of us are capable of taking pre-calculus and that anyone can take it. They just need to want it bad enough to complete the math course successfully.

- Carlee added in on the conversation. "I think that applied math is better to take because you learn more important stuff in the course compared to pre-calculus. Like in pre-calculus you learn how to figure out things that you don't need later on in life, but in applied math you learn things you can use later on in life."

- Mr. Max laughed and said, "no you don't. You are never going to go to a hardware store and buy a bunch of wood and say Oh I think I can use the Quadratic function to figure out how to make my garden." He told us his honest opinion. Mr. Max told us that if you are to choose a math course that would benefit you, it would be consumer math because you learn more valuable stuff that you would use later on in life as opposed to the applied of pre-calculus math courses. For example in consumer math you learn about banking and mortgages.

- We also had a conversation about how fortunate our school was compared to other schools. We have 600+ students and we have so many oppurtunities and options in our school that no other schools have. We are lucky that we have many options for electives and all the technology to help us with our courses such as: the computer labs, resource centre, our own laptops, etc.

-Mr. Max then showed us a video on iTunes called TEDTalks by Ken Robinson. We watched what we could for the remainder of the class.

**Homework!-- There was no assigned homework. We were told just to try and finish the questions on Jane's Garden.

The scriber for Monday is now Delaurier.