Today's soundtrack is Dream Theater: Awake, still my favourite of their albums after all these years. It holds a special place in my heart; it was the first album of theirs I bought, and the first I listened to. The odds of the Randomizer picking a Dream Theater album two days in a row is really low (if my calculations are correct, somewhere around 3%).
This afternoon, I'm finishing up my unit assignment on solving quadratic equations by factoring.
Most of the assignment was pretty straightforward, but I found the very last question to be pretty challenging. It involved first converting a word problem into an arithmetic series, then turning that arithmetic series into a quadratic equation, then solving the quadratic equation through factoring. The part that made it challenging was that the only directions were basically "Turn this into an equation, then solve the equation." I liked the challenge of getting to choose which of the tools in my mathematical toolbelt to use while solving the problem!
For anyone reading this who is interested in trying out the question, here it is, quoted from the Pearson Pre-Calculus 11 Workbook, page 194:
Cody has a daily reading program where he reads for 2 minutes more than he did the day before. On the first day, he read for 10 minutes. Cody continued his program until he had read for a total of six hours. a) Write an equation to represent the number of days, n, for which Cody read.
b) Solve the equation for n.