September 3, 2010

Pictures of the Day: August 25 - September 2, 2010

Hi Everyone! Here are the Pictures of the Day from the last few days. Hopefully there's something interesting for you in there:

August 25: "We're all equal in our big, happy world... except you, Pablo. We hate your scarf. You're out."
This was in a classroom where I teach in the evening. It's a grade school during the day.

August 26: I've seen this sign quite a few times on the way out of San Jose, but it's always been too dark (and possibly unsafe) to take a picture, so I made it a point to go a bit early and get this picture before my class on Thursday.
In any case, that seems like a very appropriate visual image for a rehabilitation school.

August 27: Some cheflera (schefflera, in English, I believe) that Angela was planting in our yard. Looks good photographed. I still think it's incredible you can just put a little stick of this in the ground and you'll have a bush within a year!

August 28: When we got back home from work, the power was out again, and it was getting dark. Plus, it had been raining all day and the condensation from the morning's showers was still on the windows.
Basically, a good time to take a nap.

August 29: Some flowers at Lucy's house. She invited us over to play Scrabble and drink coffee. Good times!

August 30: A pair of earrings that my grandma gave to Angela.

August 31: If you went to Timnath Elementary School in the late 80s and early 90s, this may look familiar to you. Or it may not. I remember being taught how to multiply this way. I was trying to explain it to some coworkers, so I went back into the past, drew up the grid, and multiplied some numbers. This is 312 times 725 which, as we all know, is 226,200. I can't believe three things:
1. That this technique for multiplying numbers actually exits and works
2. That I remembered the technique
3. That they actually TAUGHT this technique to us in 5th or 6th grade

September 1: The faucets in my hotel in Guanacaste. I started teaching an English class on Wednesday nights in a resort up there (Guanacaste is the northwest province in Costa Rica, where the most tourists go, but where I had only passed through previously). It was very nice, and I'm looking forward to continuing the class for the next seven weeks!

September 2: A windmill on the side of the road in Guanacaste. It was the first time I'd really spent any significant time or driven around much in that province, and I can see why it's the big tourist place in the country. It was pretty nice, and quite a bit different from where I live.

So, that's it for now. Thanks for reading!

365: Picture a Day Project    365 Leftovers    All My Pictures    Sitzbook

5 comments:

Dustin said...

The multiplying method is called "Lattice". I tell my kids they can use it, but it's way faster multiplying by the traditional method. I didn't think they taught that in schools during that time yet. I thought it was a fairly recent thing.

Sitzman said...

I guess it's been around a while, then. I remember that we used to have races with this in 6th grade. Actually, it was sometimes even faster than traditional multiplication, provided that you set up the grid first.
But that's the catch now, isn't it?

Paul said...

Yeah, I remember I had to use that a little bit, but looking at it again now seems pretty foreign to me. But then again, Timnath was into all kinds of alternative crap that didn't really work.

Sitzman said...

I know that there was a weird way to divide while actually multiplying, too, but I've downright forgotten that. I know that you had to always do something where you added or multiplied 10s, 100s, or 1,000s, depending on how big the numbers you were dividing were.


And I really wish I had an old CSMP workbook, but I have checked before. Every time I try to explain "minicomputers" to some hapless passerby, I really wish I had a visual aid.

luckys said...

Thanks for stopping by and sharing the love. I appreciate that!
scrabble words finder