Algebra 10-12 assignment; Feb. 10

We went over our quiz from last Friday to start the period today.  The systems of equations test will be Wednesday this week, so we will be going over several more word problems before then.  We reviewed three different types of word problems today before getting to work on our homework.

Assignment:  Word problem worksheet  # 2, 5-6, 10-11, 12, 16

Test on Wednesday of this week.

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Algebra 10-12 assignment; May 7

After going over the homework and an entry task together, we spent time reviewing the various topics we had covered during our unit on radicals.  After going over several problems together, the students then worked independently on their review sheets.  Most the students finished and checked their work before leaving class.

Test on radicals tomorrow.

Assignment:  radicals units review sheet

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View from the Pew

What's it like for a town guy to live in the country?  Everything comes in spades--heat, cold, and, Lord have mercy, wind. But the skies are so abundant, so eternal, never once the same.

Sometimes scary, often breath-taking--sometimes more than a little gaudy. Always towering. Most mornings and most evening, humbling.

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Geometry assignment; 9/8

We reviewed a couple of problems dealing with the midpoint and distance formula before taking the quiz today.  The students had the period to work on the quiz, and when they finished they got started on their assignment.


Assignment:  Segment Addition and Midpoint worksheet

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Algebra 10-12 assignment; Feb. 21

We went over our homework today and did a final review before taking a quiz today on graphing linear inequalities.  After the quiz, the students then got a start on their homework assignment for the weekend.


Assignment:  Graphing Linear Systems worksheet

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Remembering Frederick Manfred, 1912-1994 (xi)

Frederick Manfred was dying, even though he didn’t believe it himself. Harold Aardema, his long-time friend from Doon, called me and asked if I’d like to ride up to Luverne with him and visit, so we did.

On the way up, Harold told me that he’d been a bit disappointed with Fred because his youngest brother, Ed, a life-long resident of Doon, a man who was as people once said, somewhat "slow," had recently died after a long illness. Harold lamented the fact that Fred hadn’t really paid significant attention to his younger brother during that time, hadn’t visited him as he should have. I could tell that Harold was hurt by what he thought was Fred’s inattention to his brother.

Harold knew Fred as a man, not just as a lion. I remember Harold telling me how Fred had stopped at his home in Doon and wept when his marriage broke down. Fred had just picked out a burial site in the Doon Cemetery, where he wanted to be buried, “guts and all,” as he instructed his children later. That day, on our way up to Luverne, Harold, in a mission of mercy, admitted that, in not paying attention to his youngest borther, Fred had let him down.

We spent an hour or so in the hospital, Harold on one side of the bed, me on the other, and Fred loved the visit—I know he did. But when the topic of Brother Ed came up, Fred turned to me and said, “You know, Jim, I always wanted to write a story from the point of view of someone like Ed—you know, someone not totally there. To get the voice right, you know? To get that right—wouldn’t that be something?”

Freya Manfred claims that her father told her that his brother Ed’s death affected him deeply, and I have no doubt that it did. But that day, at that moment in time, with Harold sitting just across the bed, Fred’s brother’s death seemed to me to mean very little to Frederick Manfred.

Throughout his life, he taught me so many things that I don’t know that I can possibly remember them all. But that moment I’ll not forget, coming as it did in the wake of Harold Aardema’s lament. When Fred looked at me and talked to me as a writer, I couldn’t help think of what I was already coming to understand about the process of writing fiction—how it is that sometimes writers who so carefully breathe their souls into their work can begin to love the worlds of their novels more than the worlds in which they live. Storytellers—the really great ones—can and sometimes do abide more comfortably in the neighborhoods they create than they do in the here and now.

“Writing,” the essayist and historian John Milton writes in his book, Conversations with Fred Manfred, “is the absorbing purpose of Fred Manfred’s life.”

That realization made me uncomfortable, and still does. But I wonder too, whether that very passion isn’t essential to creating really great fiction, really great art.

I know another story about Fred, about his drive, his passion, something which sometimes I believe is its own species of monomania. He gave his all to his work, everything—writing was a calling/obsession. I may well be writing these words right now because it was. He was a gargantuan figure, an immense presence, a writer first of all. If he weren’t, we all might not be remembering.

A friend of his told me this story. After fielding successive rejections and suffering the resulting pain, Fred rose up in anger. “I will not be stopped,” he told this friend. “I will not be stopped.” He was fiercely angry.

Such Promethean will, admirable as it can appear from afar, feels, in the wrong place and time, like the a cousin of whatever it was that pushed along Ahab, the Captain.

Once upon a time, one of my students, young and female, an aspiring writer, took it upon herself to visit Manfred’s house on her own. I don’t know what happened between them, but she told me, brimming with anger and bitterness, that she would never go back, accompanied or unaccompanied. He was, at the time, sixty years older—or more—than she was.

Frederick Manfred taught me some things that he didn’t think of as lessons in craft. He was, without doubt, my literary father; but I’ve come to understand, for better of for worse, that I’d never give up so much of what he did to be a writer. That too is a lesson I learned from him.

______________________

Tomorrow: conclusion

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Geometry assignment; 8/27

We went through out first lesson in the language of geometry today, taking some notes on several different word definitions and drawings that are needed to work through geometric problems.  The students then got started on their homework towards the end of the period.

Assignment:  section 1-2;  page 7-8;  1-20 all, 21, 22, 25

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