Tales from the Senior Math AQ, part 1

As part of one of our activities today, each of us had to choose a mathematical concept found in the high school curriculum starting with the same first letter as our first names. Let's see, my name starts with J. Hmm. Not an easy task. I asked if I could be jerk (which is the derivative of acceleration, for you non-physics people)...that didn't fly because it isn't even in the high school physics curriculum, let alone high school math. (I don't think it even came up in the particular university physics courses I took...I think some high school teacher of mine brought it up in passing one day.) My classmate Jason and I were sitting back-to-back at different tables, and we both turned around and looked at each other and realized neither of us had a good idea, and none of our tablemates had any ideas, either (and neither did our teacher!). Eventually I decided we could be the unit vector ĵ (or j-hat, if you can't see that little circumflex). Thankfully, that worked nicely for the exercise we had to do, but for a while there ya kinda had to wish for a name starting with T (tangent trigonometry trapezoid) or something else with a lot of options. Well, at least we got to be unique :). Teachers, if you're going to use a strategy like that, have a backup for those of us who are somewhat, well, alphabetically challenged :). Oh, and you chemistry teachers out there, keep in mind there is no J on the periodic table, either. Boo-hoo :(.

All in all, my AQ course is going well so far, partly because my teacher uses a lot of group work and hands-on activities to teach us rather than lecturing for the whole 5 hours each day. The course runs 8-1:15 each day (with only a 15 minute break--yep, that's right, no lunch, but that gets us out nice and early rather than dragging the day on) and the last day of the course is July 24.