Line Art Project, Continued (Day 68)

U-N-I-T RATE! RATE! RATE!

(Unit Rate Verse)

To find the mighty unit rate,

All you do is divide.

The answer, two dots, and then a one,

Right on the other side.

And if you have a fraction,

There's no need to hate.

Flip the second and then you'll find,

The mighty unit rate!

U! N! I! T!

U-N-I-T! Rate! Rate! Rate!

I couldn't resist returning to the Unit Rate song for several reasons. First of all, this will be the last song that I perform in class for some time, so I wanted to go out with a bang. UCLA is playing USC this weekend at the Rose Bowl, so it's the perfect time to return to the UCLA fight song parody. Meanwhile, "unit rate" is basically another name for "slope," so it fits with the linear functions unit.

And recall that I originally wrote this song at the old charter school, where I wrote this unit rate verse for Grades 6-7 and an exponents verse for the eighth grade class. For Math I this year, the last topic of Chapter 1 was exponents and the first topic of Chapter 2 was slope. At one point, I was considering performing the original song in its entirety -- first the exponent verse and then the unit rate verse, in order to mark the transition from Chapter 1 to 2. But as you can see, instead I played the exponent verse at the end of Chapter 1 and waited until now, the end of Chapter 2, for the unit rate verse.

Since this is a parody, again there's no need to post any Mocha code. So I'll use the rest of this post to catch up with other things happening in the world.

First of all, you might notice that this post is labeled "Day 68," not "Days 68-70 (or 71)." That's because another post is coming tomorrow -- the seventeenth, hence the monthly post. I could mention how the line art project is going in Math I, but I'll save it for tomorrow's monthly post.

Speaking of UCLA, there is a currently a strike going on not just at UCLA, but across the entire system among UC student workers.

Late last night, the Artemis space rocket was successfully launched. It is headed for the moon -- the goal, of course, is to return humans there within the current decade. All NASA space launches are a triumph of the power of mathematics -- so when our students wonder what is the purpose of learning math, all we have to do is point to NASA.

Meanwhile, math is mentioned in tonight's episode of NOVA on PBS. The episode is all about the concepts of zero and infinity. Unfortunately, I don't have time to watch it tonight -- hopefully I'll get to view the episode very soon.