Saturday, April 27, 2024

X Marks the Side

In my continuing quest to have a Saturday with just an image, I present:

This is what I've been doing with the math classes. 

For the record, that X is the hypotenuse of this right triangle, and the trigonometric function needed to solve it is cosine. (I've been working these problems step-by-step with the kiddos. Some of them have been struggling with this, although that's to be expected as the concept is new to them.)

So: cos 43° = 36/x

Then: x = 36/cos 43°

This they can punch into their calculators to solve. (It's 49.2.)

Dangnabit! I didn't get away with no story for today, did I? Ah well...

Today's A to Z Challenge post brought to you by the letter

the letter X rendered in knitting

21 comments:

  1. X needs to stop asking "what am I" of everyone. Therapy, Mr. X, you need therapy.

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  2. That's a good solution to the problem of using X in an A to Z post.

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    1. I think the last time X fell on a Saturday, I had a picture from a math class, too. Although, that was a wanted poster...

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  3. Replies
    1. X has been my friend these last couple months while in the math class.

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  4. How fortuitous that you happen to be teaching math right now

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  5. Jamie (jannghi.blogspot.com):
    It's amazing the ways people have found to work around X during this blog event.

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    1. Saturdays are easy for me. But in prior years I made use of the fact that names like Ximena and Xavier exist.

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  6. I was trying to recall my decades-old trignometry classes. Those days we didn't have advanced calculators. So, we had to go through manys steps to get to the answer.

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  7. I was very fond of x in my math classes.

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  8. I remember books of tables for trigonometry and as well, we had slide rules - which my father, as an engineer thought preferable to calculators - too easy to make mistakes he thought and said you should always do the calculation yourself to check that its in the ballpark. I find that many young people today cannot manage mental arithmetic...Meant to say before - love the knitted numbers - I am more of a Tunisian crochet man (though I can knit too) Look out for my Y post tomorrow which i couldn't find a commodity for and so am doing Wool instead...
    https://how-would-you-know.com/2024/04/x-for-exegesis-and-a-wildcard-poem.html

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    1. Wool's not a commodity? It should be.

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    2. No - wool is a commodity which means I did W twice with there being no Y...

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  9. Today's post brought me back to the time I was learning calculus!

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  10. Seeing that math problem just gave me the heebie jeebies

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