Falllinnggg...

Unfortunately one student fell off of a ladder while working on the roof of a house. He had leaned the ladder up aganist the house, but had the base of the ladder too close to the base of the house resulting in him experiencing gravity first hane! If he had pulled the ladder to approach more of a 75* angle, he wouldn't have fallen off because of the angle he would have been at.

Morning jog.

After I got back from my morning runs I would figure out how many miles I had run. If someone runs roughly an 8 minute mile on average and ran for 20 minutes, how many miles would they have run?

"Would you like a beverage for the remainder of your flight?"

As I sat on the flight making small talk with the man sitting next to me, the stewardess began serving us drinks. The man in front of me ordered a drink costing $4.00. At the time she didn't have $16 to return to him so she said she'd be back with his change. Over the intercom they made an announcement asking if anyone had change for a $20. She had 2 tens, but she needed a ten, a five, and five one's in order to give him the proper change. Little math nuances like that pop up everywhere!

How much will my pictures cost?

When thinking about all the pictures I took, I realized I needed to take out a calculator (or do some quick mental math!) to figure out how much it would cost to print all the pictures. Different stores have different rates also!
CVS: $.29/picture with a $2.50 coupon (plus the gas to pick it up!)
Snapfish: $.09/picture with the 1st 20 free, plus shipping and handling
Walmart: $.18/picture (plus the gas to pick it up!)

Which is the best deal and why?

100 showers before dinner.

At the start of the week the leaders needs to put their math thinking caps on to decide on an efficient shower rule! When work is finished around 4, dinner is served at 6 and most people want to shower in between, 10 minutes showers aren't an option! Accomodating for 100 people showering resulted in a mandatory 2 minute rule-including dressing and undressing in the shower trailer! Surprisingly it worked pretty well, but the question of-"How many minutes can each shower be in order for 100 people to shower in 2 hours?"- was the trick, or essential math, for clean and happy people!

Fair-sharing.

Although there were 100 students on this trip, everyone was from 7 different colleges. There were 6 totaly St. Mikes' students. When they split everyone into groups, they used fair sharing. Each college was divided evenly (so we were 3 groups of 2) and then rationed to make even groups. Fair sharing is a common way to divide up groups of people evenly.

"This is a one, this is a two, this is a three..."

There's a common mind-game out there that we played mulitple times on the trip. The leader (who know's the "trick" of the game) holds up a fist and goes "This is a one." Then he puts out one finger and says "This is a two." Then the next finger (so 2 fingers are raised) to say, "This is a three." And it continues until all 5 fingers are raised, but the pinky is finger #6. The next part of the game the leader raises a finger and asks, "What's this finger?" And from the previous explaination, the player would respond accordingly, but it never is what he said it was because there's a trick to the game (which I won't give away incase anyone hasn't played this game!). As a player who doesn't know how to play the game, you'll get confused when the next time he starts the game he uses different numbers for different fingers-saying the pinky finger is a 3 and the thumb is a 6!

Through our culture we're told that certain fingers represent certain numbers. When taking piano lessons you're taught the thumb is finger 1, pointer finger 2, etc. Through observing this game, I realized that this is simply naming of the fingers. The value of the numbers is irrelevant and it is simply a nominal process.