Back to class in June

Updated, June 3

Our weekly online meetings will take place on Wednesdays in MS Teams. Before our next meeting, please read Gray Wolf’s Search with Mr Tsougrianis and explore these ideas after reading/listening. Then please leave a comment ON MR TSOUGRIANIS’S BLOG.

Please see the list of and ongoing assigned activities to work on over the rest of this week. Please also have a listen to “Sometimes a Dream Needs a Push“. I’ll be interested to know what you think of the father’s reaction to Chris’s dream, whether you think it is harder for Chris or for his dad and what you think about how they are reacting to hardship.


Canada Wc-1A (1950s)
It’s the first week of June. Where I lived when I was in elementary school long ago, the first week of June would have been our last week of the school year, so it seems more than a little odd to be writing about heading back to school right now, but I suppose that’s not all that’s a litttle out of the ordinary at the moment.

We welcome many of our students back to classrooms today while the rest will continue working from home. With this mix of working partially in person and partially from home, our schedules will change. We will move our weekly online meetings for the whole class to Wednesday mornings. I will continue to support students with their work and their questions, but I will not be able to be available for as many open drop-in sessions online. As ever, scheduled meetings will be found in our Teams calendar.

There will be a few new tasks to tackle this week, but for the moment, for those wtill working from home, taking some time to revisit unfinished comments, writing, problems and music tasks from the last week or two would be time wisely spent.

I hope to see all of you, via one means or another, very soon indeed!

A good news for the future Friday story

In all the good comeback stories, it seems like there is some morale boost that helps the team or the hero turn away from the prospect of loss or failure to instead focus on possibilities and finding a light at the end of the tunnel. So here are a couple of good news stories for the future for this Friday.

One is the recent birth of a bison, a species that was once nearing extinction.

While the bison have been reintroduced with some good success and can now be found in some protected parks and on some ranches, work goes on to try to save other species in much more immediate danger of disappearing.

So as you finish up working on other assigned tasks for this week (and even return to earlier posts to add a #CovidKindness joke or a line of verse), take a moment to look at these positive lights and bright prospects. Because focusing too much on what is not going well isn’t going to help us pick up steam and make progress whie the Fridays4Future movement to combat climate change does carry on.

A math game with its own theme song

I saw this game a while ago from Dan Finkel’s Math4Love site. We’ve used other activities based on ideas presented there. Students may remember trying to guess my rule, playing Target Number, or playing the Prime Climb board game; these all came from Math4Love. The game I’d like to introduce to you here is called Horseshoes.

This game is great for many reasons, not least of which being that it now has its own theme song! Please check it out in the video here. It will help if you can do so before our meeting later today so we can play it together (even while we are working remotely online). You can record your thinking any way you like when we play; if you like, you can use this document, which is set up a little like the whiteboards seen in the video.

Of course you can try it out before we meet and bring any questions you might have. You can also play the game anytime with family or friends (even on your own, why not?).

I still hope you’ll find some jokes to add to the comments in the last blog post. (That Joy4All joke hotline I mentioned recently is still making the news, by the way). So with that in mind, here is another amusing image from @McKellarMath.

funny talking math symbols

(If you’ve looked at my copy of Math Doesn’t Suck, you’ll be familiar with Ms McKellar’s work. Anyone old enough may remember the character she played on TV’s The Wonder Years when she was about your age. She’s still living her double life as both actor and mathematician!)


How close can you get?
One, four and eight, nine, ten, yeah
You almost got it, try it a gain…

We could all use (another) laugh

Updated May 27

I’m still hoping to see some of your jokes in the comments, and I’m hoping some (or some one) of you can tell the joke that goes with the picture at the end of this post (tweeted by Danica McKellar @McKellarMath). For now, here are a couple of to help get you started:

Question: What did the poet say to Luke Skywalker?
Answer: “Metaphors be with you.” (from Poetry Fountain)

Question: How long has Anakin Skywalker been evil?
Answer: Since the Sith Grade. (from Fatherly)


Our special guest at our recent class meeting brought some good stories, positive messages and more than a couple of good laughs. That is something we could all use: a regular healthy dose of smiles and laughter. That’s not news to six-year-old Callaghan McLaughlin from Saanich, B.C., whom we read about recently with his joke stand spreading #CovidKindness. And it made me smile again to read about how some Calgary high school students have started a joke telephone hotline.

Intending to give a little boost to the spirit and spread a little joy to seniors currently isolated at home, the teens have recorded jokes and stories along with positive messages and poems which folks can listen to over the phone. They’ve called it the Joy4ALL Project and included “JOY4ALL” in the toll-free phone number. What a wonderful idea! And it has gained some big-time attention and praise from big-time comedy. James Corden, the host of The Late Show on CBS, featured the teens’ Joy4All project in one of his segments. He also seems to have recruited comedy star Billy Crystal to lend his talents to the teens’ efforts by recording a couple of jokes for the hotline.

We are currently working on writing and recording some poetry, and it’s no surprise that the funnier verses tend to be our favourites. Why shouldn’t we record ourselves reading a few more of these? Members of our current class are hereby challenged to find a joke or funny poem to add to your recordings (scroll through some of our old favourite verses found on the poetry foundation site and you can search there for amusing work by Jack Prelutsky, Kenn Nesbitt, & Shel Silverstein for starters).

Have you got a good joke to share (or a real groaner)? Actor, author and mathematician, Danica McKellar, tweeted this image based on a well-worn math joke. Do you know it, or can you take a guess at what it is? Leave your guess or another joke or short humourous verse in a comment.

We could all use a laugh

Our special guest at our recent class meeting brought some good stories, positive messages and more than a couple of good laughs. That is something we could all use: a regular healthy dose of smiles and laughter. That’s not news to six-year-old Callaghan McLaughlin from Saanich, B.C., whom we read about recently with his joke stand spreading #CovidKindness. And it made me smile again to read about how some Calgary high school students have started a joke telephone hotline.

Intending to give a little boost to the spirit and spread a little joy to seniors currently isolated at home, the teens have recorded jokes and stories along with positive messages and poems which folks can listen to over the phone. They’ve called it the Joy4ALL Project and included “JOY4ALL” in the toll-free phone number. What a wonderful idea! And it has gained some big-time attention and praise from big-time comedy. James Corden, the host of The Late Show on CBS, featured the teens’ Joy4All project in one of his segments. He also seems to have recruited comedy star Billy Crystal to lend his talents to the teens’ efforts by recording a couple of jokes for the hotline.

We are currently working on writing and recording some poetry, and it’s no surprise that the funnier verses tend to be our favourites. Why shouldn’t we record ourselves reading a few more of these? Members of our current class are hereby challenged to find a joke or funny poem to add to your recordings (scroll through some of our old favourite verses found on the poetry foundation site and you can search there for amusing work by Jack Prelutsky, Kenn Nesbitt, & Shel Silverstein for starters).

Have you got a good joke to share (or a real groaner)? Actor, author and mathematician, Danica McKellar, tweeted this image based on a well-worn math joke. Do you know it, or can you take a guess at what it is? Leave your guess or another joke or short humourous verse in a comment.