Thursday Thought of the Day

Why do you think people are more likely to trust word of mouth rather than ads on Television?

Wisdom Wednesdays-Kofi Annan

"Knowledge is power. Information is liberating. Education is the premise of progress, in every society, in every family."-Kofi Annan

Teaching Tuesdays-Punctuation Matters!

Punctuation

These OWL resources will help you with punctuation, such as using commas, quotation marks, apostrophes, and hyphens.

Punctuation

When speaking, we can pause or change the tone of our voices to indicate emphasis. When writing, we must use punctuation to indicate these places of emphasis. This resource should help to clarify when and how to use various marks of punctuation.

Sentence Punctuation Patterns

This handout describes eight sentence punctuation patterns with examples.

Independent and Dependent Clauses

This handout defines dependent and independent clauses and explores how they are treated in standard usage.

Conquering the Comma

This presentation is designed to acquaint your students with the rules of comma usage, including placement in compound sentences, after introductory elements, with dependent phrases and clauses, around nonessential elements, in a series, and with adjectives. This presentation will also cover methods for avoiding a common comma error—the comma splice. The thirty-one slide presentation included here is designed to aid the facilitator in an interactive presentation of the elements of comma usage. This presentation is ideal for the beginning of a composition course, the assignment of a writing project, or as a refresher presentation for grammar usage.

Commas

This resource offers a number of pages about comma use.

Apostrophe

This handout provides rules and examples for apostrophe usage.

Hyphens

A comprehensive rundown on the proper use of the hyphen.

Quotation Marks

https://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/section/1/6/

A rundown of the general rules of when and where to use quotation marks.

Math Mondays:Fractions

Reducing Fractions

Mixed & Improper FractionsMultiplying & DividingAdding & SubtractingPolynomial Fractions

Purplemath

In what follows, it will sometimes be useful to remember that fractions can indicate division. For instance, 1/3 can mean "one divided by three", as well as "one part out of three parts". In fact, let's cut to the chase; memorize this sentence: "Fractions are division."

You know that any number, divided by itself, is just 1. You use this fact when you reduce fractions. If you can convert part of a given fraction into being a multiplied form of 1, then you can ignore this part, because multiplying by 1 doesn't change anying.

MathHelp.com

Reducing Fractions to Lowest Terms

For instance, here's how you would find and use a form of 1 to reduce 4/8:

$\dfrac{4}{8} = \dfrac{1 \cdot 4}{2 \cdot 4} = \dfrac{1}{2} \cdot \dfrac{4}{4} = \dfrac{1}{2} \cdot 1 = \dfrac{1}{2}$

To be very clear, the point of finding the common factor (in this case, the 4's) is to allow you to convert part of the fraction to 1. Since 4/4 = 1, then what I did above was the following:

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Warning: Note how I switched from a fraction with products (in the numerator and denominator):

$\dfrac{1 \cdot 4}{2 \cdot 4}$

...to a product of fractions:

$\dfrac{1}{2} \cdot \dfrac{4}{4}$

This switch is okay as long as you're multiplying:

$\dfrac{1 \cdot 4}{2 \cdot 4} = \dfrac{1}{2} \cdot \dfrac{4}{4}$

...but it is very much NOT if you're adding. For instance:

$\dfrac{1 + 4}{2 + 4} \neq \dfrac{1}{2} + \dfrac{4}{4}$

The left-hand side above, being a fraction containing addition, is equal to 5/6, while the right-hand side above, being an addition containing fractions, is equal to 1 1/2, so the two expressions are not at all the same value. Just remember: For fractions, multiplying is way easier than adding. Now, to get back to business...

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In addition to the canceling method I used above (with the pink 1's), you may also have seen either of the following "shorthands" for cancellation:

Any of these formats is fine. The last two are probably simplest for your handwritten homework; the first one is easier for typesetting.

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If you have a regular (scientific, business, etc.) calculator that can handle fractions, then you can enter the fraction and then hit the "equals" button to get the reduced fraction. If you have a graphing calculator with a fraction command, then you can enter the fraction as a division (because 4/8 means "four divided by eight"), and then convert to fraction form. Check your manual.

If your calculator can't handle fractions, or if the denominator is too large for the calculator to handle, here's how you do the reduction by hand.

• Reduce $\mathbf{\color{green}{\dfrac{2940}{3150}}}$ to simplest form.

I'll grab my calculator and some scrap paper, and factor the numerator (top number) and denominator (bottom number). A quick shorthand for getting the prime factorization of each of these numbers is demonstrated below, in the stacked division (by prime numbers) of 2940:

To find the factorization, I just read off the prime factors from around the outside of the upside-down division. From the above, I can see that 2940 factors as 2×2×3×5×7×7.

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Next, I'll factor the denominator, being the number 3150:

So 3150 factors as 2×3×3×5×5×7.

Now I can reduce the fraction by canceling off the common factors:

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The next section reviews mixed numbers and improper (or "vulgar") fractions....http://www.purplemath.com/modules/fraction.htm

Financial Fridays-Balancing a Checkbook

http://financeintheclassroom.org/downloads/CheckingUnitLessonPlans.pdf

Click on the link to learn how to balance a checkbook! After reading through the content, practice the problems.

Thursday Thoughts: What makes a person sucessful?

Success can be defined in a variety of ways: through work, school, or family but what makes an individual successful?

Words of Wisdom-Quote by Malcolm X