Geometry assignment; May 19

We went over our homework today before beginning the next topic.  Today we reviewed how to graph and calculate with two different forms of linear equations.  The line equations we reviewed were the slope intercept form and the standard form of a line.  Both of these topics were covered in algebra, yet also apply in dealing with coordinate geometry.  The students got started working on their assignment towards the end of the period.


Assignment:  section 13-6;  page 550-551;  written exercises #1-24 all

Geometry assignment; May 21

We went over our homework before going through the last topic on our review of linear equations.  We went over several examples with the point slope equation of lines before having the students get started on their homework.  The assignment deals with converting a variety of information into the slope intercept form of linear equations.


Assignment:  section 13-7;  page 555,  #1-28 all

Geometry assignment; May 28

We went over our homework in class today and did a short entry task before getting started on our third and final transformation.  Today we worked with rotations and used patty paper to show how these transformations can be accomplished on a graph.  I went through a couple of examples with the students together before they got started on their assignment independently.


Assignment:  Rotations worksheet

Geometry assignment; May 29

We spent time reviewing line equations and the midpoint formula before going over our homework today.  The bulk of the time was spent working on a review sheet for tomorrow's test.  The answers to the review assignment appear below.  Test on Chapters 13-14 tomorrow.

Assignment:  study the review guide;  Review assignment
Transformations packet

Page 567  #1-9 all, 15-23 all


1.  XY = 4 radical 5;  YZ = 10;  XZ = 2 radical 5
2.  XY squared + XZ squared = 80 + 20 = 100 = YZ squared
3.  center (-3, 0);  radius = 10
4.  center (5, -1);  radius = 7
5.  (x + 6)squared + (y + 1)squared = 9
6.  -1/4
7.  -19
8.  examples:  (1, 3), (2, 8), (-1, -7)
9.  0
15.  (4, -3/2)
16.  (-1, 0)
17.  (0, b)
18.  (-11, 11)
19.  line on graph passes through (0, -3) and (2, 1)
20.  line on graph passes through (4, 0) and (0, 2)
21.  (2, 1)    used elimination process on two equations in 19 and 20
22.  y = 4x + 7
23.  y = 2x + 4


Translations Rules
7.  T (2, -1)
8.  T (-1, 1)
9.  T (1, 0)
10.  T (1, -3)
11.  T (-2, -1)
12.  T (0, 4)

Reflections Rules
7.  R (over y = 2)
8.  R (over y = -x)
9.  R (over x-axis)
10.  R (over x = -3)
11.  R (over y-axis)
12.  R (over y = x)

Rotations Rules
11.  Ro (90 degrees clockwise)  or 270 degrees counterclockwise
12.  Ro (180 degrees clockwise)    or 180 counterclockwise
13.  Ro (180 degrees clockwise)  or 180 counterclockwise
14.  Ro (180 degrees clockwise)  or 180 counterclockwise

Geometry assignment; 9/2

Today's topic involved adding to our language of geometry by discussing the terms ray, segment, midpoint, and bisector.  Each one of these terms involves various symbols and drawings, as well as some calculations.  We went through several examples before getting started on the homework.


Section 1-3;  page 15-16;  written exercises #1-40 all

Commencement: You go, girl

The speaker was really very good that year; the pomp and circumstance was, as always, regal; the spectacle--all those robed faculty and grads--proud and worthy.

I've attended more than my share of college commencements, so I won't be faulted for looking around some. Besides, my appointed seat was far, far to the left of the speaker and the college pres. I was in the first row, staring up at the graduates' feet since they were on just in front of me, up on the stage.

This young grad's tattoo was right smack dab in front of my eyes: "Walk By Faith." A dreamy butterfly sits atop a sweet tendril of beneficent ivy, quite the creation. She must have been under the needle for a while.

Commencement means beginning, and graduations are--a new moment in time for those who are leaving the academic nest.

A Christian college, like the one where I worked, hopes and prays its grads will be tattooed by their education here, in just about exactly the way this young lady's right foot is, with some statement of faith that feels, like this one, part-promise and part-command. The young lady with the tattoed foot took the college's faith mantra--"every square inch"--and brandished it in a way few of her profs, experts in the field, had ever thought of.

There it was, right and front of me, like forever almost.

Women have painted their toenails for hundreds of years, but the juxtaposition was somehow enough to make me giggle. "Walk by faith," it promises, but keep your toenails pink. And what about those slivery-heeled flip-flops? An oxymoron almost, but a real fashion statement. I bet she took one look at those on the rack, and told herself she couldn't leave the store without 'em. 

Those sweet feet drew me back into the old baffling biblical line about "be yet in, but not of," for there's something almost mysteriously compelling about this young lady's bold right foot. Is that tattoo "of the world"? Most certainly is, as much an accessory as the well-heeled flip-flops and the flaring toenails. If it's just pretty, it's sinful, saith Elijah, the old man who sat there staring at that foot.

Thoreau says he would rather that people wore tattoos than a half-dozen different shirts because a tattoo is for all time, and a tux--or a graduation gown--isn't.  He had a point.

Here's what I thought: give the tattooed girl forty years and her ankles won't be as slim, nor her feet be so tan and darling. She'll likely drop the toenail polish, but the tattoo will still be there, fuzzier maybe, but it'll still be there, no matter how frumpy the shoes.

Good for her, I'm thinking.

Then again, that tattoo reminded me of her whole generation, young people immensely spiritual and immensely drawn to the things of this world--almost as if Christ had never said word about the impossibility of serving two masters. Does she really believe that cute little tattoo is a testimony? Or was it just something she got because she wanted one and she knew her old man wouldn't hit the roof if it saluted something in the Bible?

"Moral therapeutic deism," researchers called it back then, the often sketchy faith of her entire generation. They know faith has something to do with being good, and also that it's good for them, like spinach--and at the heart of it is a God, sort of.  "Sure I'm a Christian--read my t-shirt! See this tattoo I got down here? And I got another one, just as nice, on my tush. John 3:16."

I know--I'm a grumpy old man, but I still wonder whether "walk by faith" is the best thing I saw all morning at that college graduation or the worst?

She was cute, this girl--and, when it comes right down to it, so were her feet. Maybe a little silly, too, tattooed like that, but then, aren't we all a little silly sometime or other? Shouldn't Christians be a little silly?

Besides, they say you can get 'em taken off these days, those tatoos. But then would removing it belie it's testimony?  I don't know.

God almighty will have his way with her, just as he has his way with all of us, tattooed or not, barn coats or mink stoles, shirts or skins. It's his world, and we're his people.

All of that's four years ago already. I hoped she's still saying it, wherever she puts it. 

Go ahead and walk by faith, lady, I should have said.  

You go, girl.
_____________________ 

An old post from 2010, from Commencement. There's another today.

Under His Wings--Morning Thanks

"In the whole collection," says Spurgeon, "there is not a more cheering Psalm, its tone is elevated and sustained throughout, faith is at its best, and speaks nobly." He's describing Psalm 91, a poem he earlier calls "this matchless ode."

Dozens of hymns, I'm sure, offer variations, but the one most familiar to me--because most sung--may well be "Praise to the Lord, the Almighty," which was--as YouTube will be glad to point out--one of the majestic hymns sung at Westminster Cathedral for the 60th anniversary of the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II. I'm an old three-chord guitar strummer myself, but--trust me!--no crooning troubadour does that exalted hymn justice because it requires a pipe organ and some ancient, soaring cathedral. 

A thousand worship services have engraved that 17th century hymn's text forever in my memory. I know that hymn, in that grand old phrase, "by heart." So when you suddenly stumble on a new stanza, the effect is jarring, as it was last Sunday, when we sang that old classic in a tiny congregation in a staid old church nothing like the Westminster Cathedral.

Here the one I'd never seen before:

Praise to the Lord, who hath fearfully, wondrously, made thee;

Wings of His mercy did shade thee.

Health hath vouchsafed and, when heedlessly falling, hath stayed thee.

What need or grief ever hath failed of relief?

You don't have to be Robert Frost to see that those middle two lines border on the archaic; we don't regularly vouchsafe things anymore, or if we do, we don't use that word. What's more, both lines feel remarkably like log-jams; they don't fall trippingly from the tongue. They are, in the vernacular, just plain clumsy, hard to get thy lips aroundeth.

That's what I'm thinking anyway, as we sing the lines. But then there's the last--"wings of His mercy did shade thee." 

How often I haven't sung those words from Psalm 91, "this matchless ode"? Hundreds of times. I even titled a book with that image--In His Feathers, a story drawn from the journals of a woman who died from ovarian cancer. 

He will cover you with his feathers,
and under his wings you will find refuge;

I don't know why, but singing that line suddenly took me out at the knees: God almighty as a goose. A dozen of them are sitting right now, at dawn, in the bean field between our house and the river, clumsy fat guys silent as church mice for a change. In a minute, when they get a hankering, they'll take wing and start the kind of bickering honkers think of as a music. No right-thinking palace guard would have let 'em in to the Queen's Sixtieth, that's for sure.  

"Under His wings"?--some respectable editor should have caught that monstrosity long ago and red-penciled it right out of Psalm 91. God as a goose? It's weird enough to think of the Holy Ghost as a goose, but one of our most beloved biblical metaphors pictures the Creator of heaven and earth, the one God eternal, the I AM of eternal history as a fine, feathered friend--a goose or a banty hen. 

But then, the neighbor says that about an hour before a torrential rainfall late Sunday afternoon, the local gaggles all parleyed and all those geese left the water, swarmed up from the river and the sand pits like the people of Israel, and waddled, with their young, into the middle of the bean field, as if some goose meteorologist had warned of the deluge to come. Inside of an hour, the river rose two feet.

There they were, he said, prophesying, proclaiming salvation beneath a nasty sky, keeping their young under their wings and in their feathers.

Must have been beautiful.  

Praise to the Lord, the Almighty, King of creation, who is, in addition to everything else, King of the Geese.

All of that is worth my morning thanks: a drama based on Psalm 91 right here in our river valley cathedral.