An Excellent Adventure

Two Hundred Fortieth Post: An Excellent Adventure

I’m still thinking about the quadratic formula. I have a variable that should be positive, but comes up negative because of the squaring. There has got to be an easier way. There probably is but would be extremely hard to solve.

I am also thinking of physics. In the cartoon of “Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure,” they were falling to the ground while standing on some object. One of them came up with the idea that they would wait until the object was 5 feet about the ground and then jump off. When I was a kid, I couldn’t figure out why this couldn’t work. Of course now with a little knowledge of physics I know they would be moving at the same speed as the object towards the ground. It is a little question you can ask elementary school kids and see what kind of response they give.

There are a lot of inventive answers young students give when given a chance to theorize and apply what they learn. Sometimes it has to be more about invention then just memory alone when learning. For an example my fourth grade science teacher once set one of those orbiting pendulums (the ones with a ball weight attached on opposite sides of a circle) on the desk. It appeared to move back and forth without any power source. If the student could write a paper explaining how it worked they would get an A for the semester. Of course there is no thing such as perpetual motion, but imagine how hilarious the answers that were given were.

When ever you have to work out a solution by yourself you become a master of that subject. There used to be a fact that by reading you retained so much information, by hearing you learned so much, but by teaching you mastered the subject the most. I thing that problem solving and research ranks as high as teaching. But until you enter a phone booth that takes you to a different time... May the Creative Force be with You