Saturday, August 2, 2008

3.14159265358979323 et cetera....

I’m working on making a very long poster to wrap around my room – it’s pi to a whole lot of decimal places.

I have 95 feet of the poster done so far, which includes 510 decimals. I have more to go, though I’m not sure how much since I never measured the dimensions of my classroom.

Last year on pi day (March 14 – get it?), I held a contest where students recited pi out to as many decimals as they could remember. The prize was a $40 gift certificate to the mall – so kids were pretty into it. I also offered five thousand dollars (although I might have offered 1 million dollars to one class) if they could break the world record. According to Wikipedia the current record is 67,890 digits, which is pretty unbelievable.

One of my favorite students (yeah, yeah I know I’m not supposed to have favorites) won -- but he didn’t want the gift certificate. Instead, he asked if I could get him a burrito from Chipotle. YES! Food? Chipotle? Do you see why I love this kid? So we had a nice Chipotle celebratory lunch. Mmmmm Chipotle… although I really prefer Burritos En Fuego. Oh Burritos en Fuego, how I wish you were open later than 7 pm. I think that if I do the pi day contest again next year I'll keep the burrito lunch as the prize.

I need to up my pi game though. I can only remember 3.14159265358979323 – that’s pathetic for a math teacher, regardless of the fact that I was not a math major.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

See, I thought that the prize would be a nice cobbler, or pastry tart, or some such.

Or, you could just take the circumference of an apple, divide it by its diameter and get...well, you know.

Jackie Secor said...

Ha! I totally told that "apple pi" joke to my kids... whoosh right over their heads. Either that or they got it and thought it was lame and wouldn't even give me a courtesy laugh.

Anonymous said...

I like the rug under pi.

Anonymous said...

I mean, I wonder how the pi got on the rug?