How Can You Prepare Your Child For The MCAS?

 

By Sally Rosenthal

 

This week, the topic is: how can you help your child prepare for stressful MCAS testing this week?

Here's Sally's take:

Spring time in Massachusetts means it’s MCAS season. If your child is taking or has taken an MCAS or other standardized test, how do you as a parent help them prepare?

As a former teacher, I find one of the most important things a parent can do in the days leading up to the exam is to make sure their children are eating well and getting enough sleep. Parents can provide encouragement to their children, and help them identify some of their strengths to build the children’s confidence going in to the test.

To help alleviate test anxiety, parents can assure their children that while the MCAS is important, and should be taken seriously, it’s also just one test; one of many ways teachers can see how the children are learning. Remind the kids that all of their teachers since kindergarten have been helping them prepare for these tests, and that the MCAS is a great opportunity to show off how much they’ve learned.

Good luck to all the parents who have kids taking the MCAS!

http://westford.patch.com/articles/how-can-you-prepare-your-child-for-the-mcas

Mike's Math Corner: Another SAT Example!

Back again with another difficult SAT math problem. This one involves some tough algebra that many students might trip up on. If you're an algebra ace, this problem won't take too much of your time. If you're not, then luckily we have tricks to solve multiple choice questions without doing the algebra at all. In fact, all we'll need to know is PEMDAS. Using the trick, in this case, wont even waste much time.

If x=5+4t^2 and y=3+2t, what is x in terms of y?

a) y^2-6y+14
b) y^2+6y+14
c) 4y^2-24y+36
d) 4y^2-24y+41
e) 4y^2+24y+41

Yet again, I'll start out using tricks that involve less advanced algebra. Pick a number for 't'. I usually stay away from 0 or 1 when doing this, as multiplying by 1 or 0 can make multiple answers look possible. I'm going with 2. So x=5+4(2)^2-->x=21. And y=3+2(2)-->y=7. Now we just need to plug y=7 into the answer choices and see which one gives us
21.

a)7^2-6(7)+14-->49-42+14=21.... there's our answer already.
b)7^2+6(7)+14-->49+42+14=63
c)4*7^2-24*7+36 -->196-168+36=64
d)4*7^2-24*7+41 -->196-168+41=69
e)4*7^2+24*7+41 -->196+168+41=405

*notice that by choosing 2 for t gave us different numbers for every answer choice. This makes it easy to see the right answer right away.

And if you prefer an algebraic approach to the question, you could solve t in terms of y, and substitute into the equation for x:
y=3+2t-->(y-3)/2=t
Now substitute this value of t into the x equation:
x=5+4t^2--> x=5+4[((y-3)/2)^2] *be very careful in squaring the y-3 here, FOIL* x=5+4(y^2-6y+9)/4 --> x=5+y^2-6y+9 --> x=y^2-6y+14 ...

This is answer a.

Always keep in mind that there is (almost) always more than one way to solve a math problem. On multiple choice questions, working backwards can sometimes be easier and faster than going forwards. Testing your answer choices to match the original question is a great tactic for any question you might get stuck on!

Beth's Book Corner: Is Twilight Suitable For Your Teen?

Twillight fever is taking over the teen community. Devoted "Twi-hards" have been swept up into the romance and danger of Stephanie Meyers' series of novels on a turbulent love triangle of the mortal Bella, vampire Edward, and werewolf Jacob. Teen girls everywhere are hanging up their Harry Potter scarves in favor of vampire fangs. But could reading the Twilight series be sending the wrong messages to todays teen girls?

In my opinion, the relationship between Edward and Bella is a dangerous one for teens to idolize. Edward is glamorized as being romantic and protective of Bella, but his actions can also be viewed as abusive and controlling. At one point in one of the books, Edward removes the engine from Bella's truck in order to prevent her from seeing Jacob. Edward doesn't trust Bella, and likes to control her actions. Such behaviors should not be glamorized to young teens who are beginning to date themselves.

Also, it is glamorized as being romantic when Edward sneaks into Bella's house at night to watch her while she sleeps. I find that creepy rather than romantic, and Edward should be arrested for breaking and entering.

I've talked to many young teen girls who insist that Edward's actions are romantic and he is the epitome of the "perfect guy", and I do my best to convince them to rethink things through a bit.

Is Bella really the role model that teens should be looking up to and emulating? She defines herself by her romantic relationship with Edward, often claiming she's nothing without him. Feminism has progressed way too far to set us back 50 years and putting the man in charge of the relationship. Bella needs to stand on her own two feet and think for herself.

As much as I criticize the Twilight novels, I can't completely condemn anything that encourages kids today to step away from their cell phones and laptops and pick up a book. I just highly encourage discussing the relationships in Twilight with your children as they read. Or better yet, pick up a copy of "The Hunger Games" which has a similar love triangle, similar danger, and a much stronger role model.

St. Patrick's Day History for Kids!

St. Patrick's Day is an Irish holiday celebrated all around the globe to honor the patron saint of Ireland, Saint Patrick. Read on to learn more about the origin of the holiday and about the man who inspired it or visit our "Fun Facts about St. Patrick's Day" story.

When Is St. Patrick's Day?

Saint Patrick's Day is celebrated each year on March 17th.

Who Was Saint Patrick?
Even though Saint Patrick the patron saint of Ireland and one of the most celebrated religious figures around the world, the factual information about his life and times is quite vague. Most information about St. Patrick has been twisted, embellished, or simply made up over centuries by storytellers, causing much ambiguity about the real life of St. Patrick. However, there are a some elements of his story about which most scholars accept to be true.

According to Coilin Owens, Irish literature expert and Professor Emeritus of English at George Mason University, Saint Patrick is traditionally thought to have lived "between 432-461 A.D., but more recent scholarship moves the dates up a bit." At the age of sixteen he was kidnapped from his native land of the Roman British Isles by a band pirates, and sold into slavery in Ireland. Saint Patrick worked as a shepherd and turned to religion for solace. After six years of slavery he escaped to the Irish coast and fled home to Britain.

While back in his homeland, Patrick decided to become a priest and then decided to return to Ireland after dreaming that the voices of the Irish people were calling him to convert them to Christianity.
After studying and preparing for several years, Patrick traveled back to Ireland as a Christian missionary. Although there were already some Christians living in Ireland, St. Patrick was able to bring upon a massive religious shift to Christianity by converting people of power. Says Prof. Owens, "[St. Patrick] is credited with converting the nobles; who set an example which the people followed."
But Patrick's desire to spread of Christianity was not met without mighty opposition. Prof. Owens explains, "Patrick ran into trouble with the local pagan priesthood, the druids: and there are many stories about his arguments with them as well as his survival of plots against them." He laid the groundwork for the establishment of hundreds of monasteries and churches that eventually popped up across the Irish country to promote Christianity.

Saint Patrick is also credited with bringing written word to Ireland through the promotion of the study of legal texts and the Bible, says Prof. Owens. Previous to Patrick, storytelling and history were reliant on memory and orally passing down stories.

Patrick's mission in Ireland is said to have lasted for thirty years. It is believe he died in the 5th century on March 17, which is the day St. Patrick's Day is commemorated each year.

The first year St. Patrick's Day was celebrated in America in 1737 in Boston, Massachusetts. The first official St. Patrick's Day parade was held in New York City in 1766. As the saying goes, on this day "everybody is Irish!" Over 100 U.S. cities now hold Saint Patrick's Day parades.

Alecia Dixon is a freelance contributor. Laura Young is editor of Crafts and Holidays & Fun on Kaboose.com.

http://holidays.kaboose.com/patrick-history.html

Beware the Ides of March!

March funeral procession an annual tradition at Taunton High School

 

 

By GERRY TUOTI

Staff Writer

Posted Mar 15, 2011 @ 10:56 PM

 

Taunton —

Rather than heeding the warning to beware the Ides of March, students at Taunton High School embrace the inauspicious date each year.

Shouting “Caesar mortuus est” or “Caesar is dead,” dozens of toga-clad members of the high school’s Latin Club  paraded through the halls Tuesday morning to reenact the funeral procession of Julius Caesar. The slain Roman leader was stabbed to death 2,055 years ago Tuesday.

The annual tradition, which began nearly 50 years ago at Taunton High School, is the Latin Club’s primary activity each year.

“It’s a lot of fun, and I think the other kids in the school get a kick out of it,” said student Declan Lynch, co-president of the Latin Club.

For Lynch, fellow co-president Kelsey Kerkoff and the club’s other seniors, Monday was their last Ides of March reenactment as students.

“It’s a little bittersweet,” Kerkoff said. “I’m excited, but a little sad at the same time.”

Borrowing elements from history and the Shakespearean drama “Julius Caesar,” each student portrayed a character, such as Brutus, Marc Antony, Cleopatra and Pliny.

Freshman Derek Simpson, who sported a toga stained with theatrical blood, played Caesar. His job was to lie on a stretcher as two pallbearers in centurion armor carried him through the school.

The procession made several stops, where the reenactors gave brief theatrical performances to classmates and teachers who assembled in the hallways to observe the spectacle.

As he does every year, Latin teacher Chris Scully donned a toga to partake in the procession. He remembered doing the Ides of March procession years ago when he was a student at Taunton High.

“It was much smaller then,” he said. “The students now are responsible for the growth of the event.”
Invited guests Doug and Kathy Ryan also participated in the march. The husband-and-wife duo, both retired educators, belong to Historia Antiqua and visited Taunton High School to give a presentation on the Roman army.

Elizabeth Rodrigues, curriculum supervisor for the foreign languages department, said the Ides of March event is a perfect tie-in to National Foreign Language Week, which Taunton is currently celebrating. She credits a vibrant Latin program at the school with successfully carrying on the mid-March tradition.

“Just to have a school tradition is an important thing,” she said. “This is one of the oldest at Taunton High. This is something everyone looks forward to.”

Contact Gerry Tuoti at gtuoti@tauntongazette.com.

Read more: http://www.tauntongazette.com/archive/x1707782508/Ides-of-March-funeral-procession-an-annual-tradition-at-Taunton-High-School#ixzz1GmhL4OIo

We Come To Bury Caesar, Not to Praise Him

The bloody end of Julius Caesar forever darkened the Ides of March.

Brian Handwerk

for National Geographic News

Updated March 15, 2011

Caesar: The ides of March are come.
Soothsayer: Aye, Caesar, but not gone.
—Julius Caesar, Act III, Scene 1

Thanks to Shakespeare's indelible dramatization, March 15—also called the Ides of March—is forever linked with the 44 B.C. assassination of Julius Caesar, and with prophecies of doom.
"That line of the soothsayer, 'Beware the ides of March,' is a pithy line, and people remember it, even if they don't know why," said Georgianna Ziegler, head of reference at Washington, D.C.'s Folger Shakespeare Library.

Until that day Julius Caesar ruled Rome. The traditional Republican government had been supplanted by a temporary dictatorship, one that Caesar very much wished to make permanent.
But Caesar's quest for power spawned a conspiracy to have him killed, and on the Ides of March, a group of prominent Romans brought him to an untimely end in the Senate House.

It Wasn't Just Caesar Who Paid the Price on Ides of March
Aside from its historical connection, the concept of the Ides of March would have resonated with English citizens in 1599, the year Shakespeare's play Julius Caesar was probably performed, Ziegler said.
"This whole business of the Ides of March and timekeeping in the play would have had a strong impact on audiences," she said.

"They were really struck by the differences between their Julian calendar [a revision of the Roman calendar created by Caesar] and the Gregorian calendar kept in Catholic countries on the continent."
Because the two calendars featured years of slightly different lengths, they had diverged significantly by the late 16th century and were several days apart.
(Related: "Leap Year: How the World Makes Up for Lost Time.")

In Roman times the Ides of March was mostly notable as a deadline for settling debts.
That calendar featured ides on the 15th in March, May, July, and October or on the 13th in the other months. The word's Latin roots mean "divide," and the date sought to split the month, originally at the rise of the full moon.

But because calendar months and the lunar cycle are slightly out of sync, this connection was soon lost.

Ides of March Assassins: Heroes or Murderers?

The Ides of March took on special significance after Caesar's assassination—but observance of the anniversary at the time varied among Roman citizens.

"How they felt depended on their political position," said Philip Freeman, a classicist at Luther College in Decorah, Iowa, and the author of Julius Caesar.

"Some were thrilled that Caesar had died, and some were horrified," he said.

The debate about Caesar's fate has extended through the ages and was taken up by some major literary figures. In Dante's Inferno, for example, Caesar is in Limbo, a relatively pleasant place in hell reserved for virtuous non-Christians.

"But Brutus [one of the leaders of the assassination] is down in the very center of hell with Judas, being munched on by Satan—it's about as bad as you can get," Freeman said.

The Folger library's Ziegler thinks the Bard had a more balanced view.

"I think Shakespeare shows both of them as being humans with their own weaknesses and strong points," she said.

Whether they were heroes or murderers, the real-life Ides of March assassins were subjected to less than pleasant outcomes.

"Within a couple of years Brutus and [fellow assassin] Cassius were dead," Freeman noted.

"They were not able to bring back the Republic, and really what they did was usher in more of a permanent dictatorship under the future Roman emperors—the opposite of what they intended."

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2011/03/110315-ides-of-march-2011-facts-beware-caesar-what-when/

Happy Pi Day, math lovers!

Andrew Couts

Get out your favorite circular objects, people, it’s Pi Day 2011!

As the math and science enthusiasts among us already know, March 14 (i.e. 3/14) is official Pi Day — a day to celebrate the number Pi, identified by the Greek letter π, which is used to calculate the circumference of a circle.

Pi is most often shortened to 3.14. But because the number is both irrational and transcendental, it “will continue indefinitely without repeating,” as the official Pi Day website, PiDay.org, kindly explains.
With the use of handy computers, Pi has now been calculated out to over 1 trillion digits past the decimal. It is Pi’s mysterious nature — the fact that it can never be entirely known — that has helped generate the adoration for it held by the mathematically inclined.

The famous symbol for Pi, π, was first used by Welsh mathematician William Jones in his work Synopsis Palmariorum Matheseos, which was published in 1706. It wasn’t until its adoption by Swiss mathematician Leonhard Euler in 1737, however, that the Pi symbol gained widespread popularity.

So, what is the purpose of Pi Day?

“It’s primarily a chance to have fun with the topic of math and science,” David Blater, author of The Joy of Pi, tells Time.com‘s NewsFeed blog. “And while it celebrates Pi officially, it’s more of an excuse to get excited and show the fun side of math and science.”

The first Pi Day was celebrated in 1989 at the San Francisco Exploratorium, which remains one of Pi Day’s primary promoters. Today, Pi Day celebrations take place in countless grade schools across the country.

While a wide variety of Pi Day celebrations are acceptable, some of the most popular include circle-measuring parties, watching the movie Pi, Pi recitation contests (to see who can accurately recall the most digits) and, of course, eating actual pie!

So get out there, and enjoy all things circular. It would make your maths teachers proud.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/digitaltrends/happypidaymathlovers

Happy Birthday Dr. Seuss!

Happy Birthday Dr.Seuss: 5 things you didn't know about Theodore Geisel

BY BRAD FRENETTE, VANCOUVER SUN MARCH 2, 2011 9:23 AM 

Dr. Seuss.

Photograph by: Handout, VS

Theodore "Dr. Seuss" Geisel, the most famous children's book writer/illustrator of all time, was born 104 years ago today in Springfield, Massachusetts.

You've read the books – and if you've got youngsters about, you're likely re-reading them quite often – but what do you know of the man who was Seuss?

Illuminate your further readings with our top five little known Geisel facts:

5: Dr. Seuss rhymes with another epic figure in children's literature: Mother Goose. Coincidence? No. That's why he chose it.

4: When presenting the dialogue for the magicians in Bartholomew and the Oobleck, Seuss employed the use of trochees (or chorues) which presents text in an alternating pattern of stressed and unstressed syllables ("Shuffle, duffle, muzzle, muff". The techique was also used by Shakespeare with his cauldron stirring witches in Macbeth (Toil! Toil!), by Poe in his poem The Raven and often in nursery rhymes.

3: After his career as a children's author/illustrator began, Geisel worked as an editorial cartoonist in New York during World War 2, which illustrated his rabid anti-fascism views. You can view a collection of his political cartoons here. They were also collected in a book called Dr.Seuess Goes to War, with an introduction by Art Spiegleman. Suess also wrote several WW2-era propaganda films.

2. Theodore Geisel wrote children's books under a trio of pen names: Dr. Seuss, which was reserved for the books he both wrote and illustrated; as Theo LeSeig, for books that he wrote without illustrating; and as Rosetta Stone, for one book he penned called Because a Little Bug Went Ka-choo!

1: Dr. Seuss' The Cat in the Hat was born as a response to an article which was published in Life Magazine in 1954,. The piece criticized American school primers as intensly boring, unchallenging to readers and responsible for causing harm to children's literacy. The article called for more primers to up the excitement by energizing the language and including drawings like those of "imaginative geniuses among children’s illustrators, Tenniel, Howard Pyle, Theodor S. Geisel." Using the piece as a call to action, Geisel and his publisher came up with a list of 400 "exciting" words, which Seuss than narrowed down for the book, and included 13 more of his own. The final product is 1626 words in length and uses a total vocabulary of 236 words.

© Copyright (c) The Vancouver Sun

Read more:http://www.vancouversun.com/Happy+Birthday+Seuss+things+didn+know+about+Theodore+Geisel/4372179/story.html#ixzz1FSuIAQUE