Almost every day I write the date on the board using a mathematical expression. Today I was lazy and just wrote February 12, 2014. Sometimes I think my kids don't like the date being written in math language, so I just put the regular date. During my last class of the day, just as I was finished doing a proof at the board and we were about to play Mastermind, one of my students asked me to come back so she could ask me something. When I got there, she told me the date on the board was bothering her and and wondered if I could write the date as log(base 2)4096 = x. I said probably no one else would understand it, but ok. So I went up and wrote it on the board, then we went on to play Mastermind. At the end of the hour as students were leaving, another student came up to me and said that he thinks that x doesn't equal 12. I grabbed my calculator and showed him how to rewrite the equation so that 2^12 = 4096. The first student also argued that the equation was right. I couldn't believe I was having this conversation! These are two freshmen who are in both geometry and algebra 2 who are thinking about logarithms outside of their algebra 2 class. It was so cool! I also had to share it with the algebra 2 teacher because I thought it was so great.
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