The Backstory I’m a Houston boy. I was born there and grew up there. My family lives there. I lived there long enough to know that it’s a subtropical environment that, periodically, gets a deluge of rain. Some of the storms have names like Claudette, Allison, or Ike. Most of them do not, like the storm that sat over western and northwestern portions of the Houston area on April 17, 2016. Overnight on Sunday, large portions of Southeast Texas received as much as 20 inches of rain in a few hours. On Monday morning, many people woke up with water […]
Quadratic Functions and Projectile Motion
Throwing Your Weight Around No, dear, you cannot change -16 to -12 in the quadratic equation because it factors more nicely. –Disgruntled Curriculum Specialist, Could Be Your ISD Ever feel like every quadratic equation has an x-squared term with a coefficient of -16 or -4.9? -16 factors nicely but -4.9 certainly doesn’t. Projectile motion is a great context and is highly relevant both to students and to a variety of careers and situations. Coefficients of -16 and -4.9 are directly related to Earth’s gravity, so it’s hard to change those values so that the curve makes a prettier graph or so […]
