{"id":6701,"date":"2025-11-01T17:57:29","date_gmt":"2025-11-01T23:57:29","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/augerhandle.net\/blogs\/jumpingfish\/?p=6701"},"modified":"2025-11-01T17:59:21","modified_gmt":"2025-11-01T23:59:21","slug":"complex-highlighting","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/augerhandle.net\/blogs\/jumpingfish\/2025\/11\/01\/complex-highlighting\/","title":{"rendered":"Complex Highlighting"},"content":{"rendered":"

On Wednesday, they learned how to complete the square<\/em>, a long-ish process that generally makes the kids’ eyes roll back in their heads. In a few days, we’ll use that to derive the quadratic formula<\/em>. But first, we need to discuss taking the square root of a negative number. (Quelle horreur!)<\/em> For this, they’ll need to learn complex numbers.<\/p>\n

So that’s what we did on Friday.<\/p>\n

In the course of the lesson, I grabbed a green highlighter and highlighted the real part of a complex number in an example problem. Then I highlighted the imaginary part in yellow. As I did this, I heard talking at the desks behind me.<\/p>\n

Now, you must know that during this period, at this pod of five students, there is almost always some talking. They’re rascals, and nothing I have done has solved that problem. Still, they’re good-natured rascals, we get along well, and there’s something about the five of them that seems to be engaged, even if there’s consistently a lot of talking among them.<\/p>\n

I glanced over my shoulder, preparing to stare them down. This technique works remarkably well — turn, stop teaching, and stare patiently until they realize that everyone is watching them chat. But when I looked over, I saw that the conversation was about who was going to get which color highlighter. Matt held a blue one up in the air, taunting Dannielle until she settled on orange.<\/p>\n

It’s not every day that students wrestle over who gets dibs on the highlighters for the notes. So I turned back around and continued the lesson.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

On Wednesday, they learned how to complete the square, a long-ish process that generally makes the kids’ eyes roll back in their heads. In a few days, we’ll use that to derive the quadratic formula. But first, we need to discuss taking the square root of a negative number. (Quelle horreur!) For this, they’ll need […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/augerhandle.net\/blogs\/jumpingfish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6701"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/augerhandle.net\/blogs\/jumpingfish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/augerhandle.net\/blogs\/jumpingfish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/augerhandle.net\/blogs\/jumpingfish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/augerhandle.net\/blogs\/jumpingfish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6701"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/augerhandle.net\/blogs\/jumpingfish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6701\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6703,"href":"https:\/\/augerhandle.net\/blogs\/jumpingfish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6701\/revisions\/6703"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/augerhandle.net\/blogs\/jumpingfish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6701"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/augerhandle.net\/blogs\/jumpingfish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6701"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/augerhandle.net\/blogs\/jumpingfish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6701"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}