Hey it's Tuesday again! I woke up late this morning so I had to rush to pick up my friend Mark and get to OCC on time. But I was still ten minutes late for my Math 112 class. Thankfully, Professor Mary Crawford-Mohat was gracious and excused me. There's no way I'm letting that happen again. I find Math 112 really easy but some of the problems can be tricky. Today we did a practice on fully understanding large numbers, and the differences between making guesses and numeric predictions. Before that and actually right after I joined the class late, professor Mary Mohat asked us how many times we could fold a 8" by 12" paper. Many of the students replied with number eight and higher and I was leaning towards eight myself. Once we actually did fold our papers we were shocked to realize that the maximum number of folds we could make was only 6 or maybe 7. I don't know about the other students, but I was intregued by the number of fold I made, which was 6. I unfolded the paper and counted how many squares made out of the creases were in the paper and there were 64(8x8). Then I folded the paper 4 times and I noticed it made 16(2x8) squares on the paper. Following this I folded the paper 5 times and found that my hunch was right it made 32(4x8) squares. I realized that there is a common denominator between the numbers; 16, 34, and 64 and it is 8. I also saw a pattern that the other denominator was rising by 2 each time the paper was folded. With this information I found I was able to predict how many squares would be made if a paper could be folded 7, 8, 9 and etc. times. All the while the rest of the class had continued on to discuss the difference between guessing and predicting. I raised My hand looking for brownie points for finding a pattern and being able predict the outcome of a problem we had already worked on and over looked in class.
After getting out of Math class at 10:50am I ate lunch and looked over my math homework in till 12:30 when I attended English class for the third time.
This class was the the first session of really learning writing skills, besides understanding the commitment we must have to succeed in our writing education so I was really wondering how this would turn out. Patrick Snow, our English professor began by writing the #1 goal of writing on the chalk board, "Clearly communicate a message to a reader." Continuing, P. Snow explained the correct structure or guidelines to follow while writing sentences and paragraphs. Right now I'm trying to follow those guidelines he taught today but I don't know how successful I am turning out to be. I could write the outline of notes I took but it would be very boring since I'm not Patrick Snow who seems to animate the classroom and keep students interested in what he is saying, I don't think its just me. As a discourse community we formed a practice paragraph following the framework constructed by Patrick Snow. Overall I found English, for the first time in my life, to be exciting and even entertaining. All throughout high school I found writing a pain in the ass but now I almost want P. Snow to assign some writing so that I can practice my writing skills. In conclusion P. Snow wrote with chalk the 2nd goal of writing, "All good papers answer a good question."
Class ended at 1:50pm I talked to Patrick Snow a minute and told him about this blog, he like the idea so here I am continuing to write. I really hope I can keep this up for the rest of this semester, though I'm sure blogs will become shorter as I become busier with homework and studies.
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