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If you don’t already know them, here are a few math tricks that might be of help, particularly if you don’t have any pencil and paper handy.

I’m not going to embed the video, but Sophia and Enzo enjoyed watching this TED Talk by magician Keith Barry. If you like magic or cars (David!), I think you’ll want to see it.

Much like some of the seventh graders, many of you are interested in warfare, including weapons such as catapults and trebuchets. You might want to download and install Trebstar, “a Mac and PC trebuchet modeling software [which] calculates the range and efficiency of your trebuchet design.” I found it while reading another article from GeekDad which has a variety of links and resources for the upcoming Punkin Chunkin World Championships.

Parents (Students too):

You might enjoy reading this article from TIME magazine. It takes a look at parenting in the early twenty-first century and suggests that there is a growing movement to be more relaxed about raising our children. Here is a clip from the beginning of the article:

We were so obsessed with our kids’ success that parenting turned into a form of product development. Parents demanded that nursery schools offer Mandarin, since it’s never too soon to prepare for the competition of a global economy. High school teachers received irate text messages from parents protesting an exam grade before class was even over; college deans described freshmen as “crispies,” who arrived at college already burned out, and “teacups,” who seemed ready to break at the tiniest stress.

This is what parenting had come to look like at the dawn of the 21st century — just one more extravagance, the Bubble Wrap waiting to burst.

And here is an example of some of the interesting contents that appear later on:

“[M]anagers at Caltech’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) noticed the younger engineers lacked problem-solving skills, though they had top grades and test scores. Realizing the older engineers had more play experience as kids — they’d taken apart clocks, built stereos, made models — JPL eventually incorporated questions about job applicants’ play backgrounds into interviews.”

Don’t forget to check Rosana’s blog to see what is going on in Spanish. She just posted an update for the week and you may have missed the Día de los Muertos photos from a couple of weeks ago.

Don’t miss Carwai’s latest math/science update.