My people

My favorite class to teach (at least right now) is the Honors Analysis class.  I don't know why the name got switched from Pre-Calc to Analysis, but that's what it is.  It is a hard course and covers a lot of material.  Students usually struggle and then whine when they are not making an A.  But the thing that I love about teaching it is that many of these kids are actually having to think in math for the first time ever.  

Today, we started discussing the 6 trigonometric functions.  You know, sine, cosine, tangent, secant, cosecant, and cotangent.  One of my students piped up that secant is her favorite becasue the abbreviation for it is sec and that makes her think of sports and why she needs to do well in math so that she can keep playing.  I made the confession that my favorite is cosine because something about the sine function seems like it is the overachiever.  And I like to root for the underdog.  And I got made fun of, which is completely what I expected.

And then, L. said, "When I was little, I didn't have imaginary friends.  I had imaginary numbers."  I asked her to eleborate on this.  (That sounds fancy.  Really I said "What?!?")

And she said that it was true, each number had it's own personality.  The number 2- a tomboy.  And 6- the goody-goody teacher's pet.

How funny is that?  These kids are my kind of people.