Filed under: School
I was watching a television show on the Discovery Network not too long ago. (I like to call myself a nerd but Hugh Henderson our Science guru says that since I am employed I’m a geek… nerds aren’t employed. Whatever. Anyway, back to the story An airport was being built. The terminal was covered by one very very long roof. This roof was called the great arc(h) or circle… can’t remember which… but the cool thing about it was it would make a circle if you continued the ends onward (downward). (I’m looking for a picture and I will insert it in the place of this sentence when I find it!)
That got me thinking about the Great Circle Route that airliners use to get from one place to another on our fabulous planet. A wiki describes the Great Circle Route as…
The great-circle distance is the shortest distance between any two points on the surface of a sphere measured along a path on the surface of the sphere (as opposed to going through the sphere’s interior). Because spherical geometry is rather different from ordinary Euclidean geometry, the equations for distance take on a different form. The distance between two points in Euclidean space is the length of a straight line from one point to the other. On the sphere, however, there are no straight lines. In non-Euclidean geometry, straight lines are replaced with geodesics. Geodesics on the sphere are the great circles (circles on the sphere whose centers are coincident with the center of the sphere).
Between any two points on a sphere which are not directly opposite each other, there is a unique great circle. The two points separate the great circle into two arcs. The length of the shorter arc is the great-circle distance between the points. Between two points which are directly opposite each other, called antipodal points, there are infinitely many great circles, but all great circle arcs between antipodal points have the same length, i.e. half the circumference of the circle, or πr, where r is the radius of the sphere.
Because the Earth is approximately spherical (see spherical Earth), the equations for great-circle distance are important for finding the shortest distance between points on the surface of the Earth, and so have important applications in navigation.
Blah Blah Blah… all of that to tell you it’s a zero… kind of…
In education we often look at the zero as an end to a means. I’ll show them! ZERO! I wonder how that would work with my staff if I gave a ZERO every time they were late turning something in. How about a ZERO every time I go into a classroom and the teacher has just gone across the hall… ZERO. Late for picking up the kids from lunch… ZERO! Not teaching enough social studies… ZERO. Not enough science… ZERO! Late for D-hall duty… ZERO. Late for crosswalk duty… ZERO!
I’m exaggerating… I know… I used to agree with the zero… when I first started teaching it was about getting those grades… you had to earn everything… I still agree with earning everything. However, you earn it by what you know and can do… not how many worksheets you fill in correctly.
ZERO’s… love’em or leave’em… the world is now gray to me… shades of gray… nothing is cut and dry… I don’t need the zero. Let’s move on!
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