h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

So where have I been this past month or so, you ask? Well, for most of the month, I've been scoring standardized tests online. Actually, I've been scoring one question of one test that whole time. One question. For an average of 6 hours a day. Five days a week. From the 11th until the 26th (it was estimated to last until the 29th, but we got finished early.) It was a math question, that had to do with Order of Operations--thus my tag, which no one seems to have noticed *pouts*

On the 22nd, Faith's class had a fieldtrip to Stout Grove (Tom, Grace, and I joined them)--the hiking trail mentioned in the Coastal Redwoods Entry as being wheelchair accessible. I can now say that the source I got that info from was correct--the trail is wide, level, and flat. There *is* a bit of a hill coming from the parking lot, but it's paved. There's a spot in the trail where it looks like the trees are growing through, but the trail's laid around them, since they obviously predate the trail there's also a couple of spots where the trail follows fallen tree trunks, which helps bring these trees into perspective--especially since you can touch them. Great for min and 2legs to tell just how big these trees are! When/if they get here...

The middle bit of this last week, I was painting a sign. Finished at 2:30 am on the 29th. Went to bed, then got up at 6 to take a shower and get both girls and I ready to go on a whole school fieldtrip to http://www.rvfamilyfuncenter.com/

Hi, Amy. I hope they were paying you to do that scoring, as i6t sounds like hard w*rk.

You bet your sweet bippy! No way I would've done it otherwise. I've scored for Pearson Education Management before, so I knew what I was getting into, but the money will help some until I go back to work next school year.

Now, then, who is this dear Aunt Sally that you've listed after your name?

Finally!

The order of operations, for math, is Parantheses, Exponents, Multiplication, Division (left to right--whichever comes first), Addition, and Subtraction (also left to right), or PEMDAS, or Please Excuse My Dear Aunt Sally. One day, for about 2 hours straight, it seemed like every single response had Please Excuse etc. written on it somewhere. So I decided that Sally must've been really horrid

She probably lost her sanity after grading the same question day in and day out for 30 years .

I did notice, Amy. Sorry I didn't say anything, but since Aunt Sally never once mentioned that functions, such as logarithms or trig functions, trump parentheses, I totally agreed that she did have a lot to answer for.

I'm just surprised she showed up on 5th graders' tests--I don't remember meeting her until 8th grade, myself!

Ah, on this side of the pond we have a different mnemonic, BOMDAS or BODMAS (brackets off, divide, multiply, add, subtract) and we certainly didn't learn about it until secondary school, around age 12 or 13.

mini

I've mentioned elsewhere that I bought an "ignorant" page a day puzzle calendar.

One of the most ignorant things about it is when it does math equation puzzles. Some of these are simply fill in the operands.

The writers of this calendar have never meet Aunt Sally.
The answers only work if you go by the order used by someone typing the equation into a calculator verbatim.

For instance on today's entry is this equation:
5 + 2 x 4 - 8 = 20

5

>>> I'm just surprised she showed up on 5th graders' tests--I don't remember meeting her until 8th grade, myself!

Maybe she wasn't properly introduced. "Children, we have a visitor today. Say hello to my dear Aunt Sally."

As soon as multiplication was introduced (3rd grade?) then someone should have talked about order of operations, or the children might have grown up to make puzzle calendars with silly math errors.

I grew up in a very small town with a very experienced group of elementary school teachers, almost all of them born in the 19th century.

I don't think dear aunt Sally was even on the horizon when they got their teaching training at normal school. One of my most durable memories was of breaking the plastic version of the quill pen when I was in fourth grade. If you've sene the film "Doubt", you'll remember that the straightlaced teacher played by Meryl Streep despised ball-point pens bercause fountain pens were so much more graceful. That was the mentaility of many of my teachers as well.