YEARS AND
COUNTING
150 AROUND CAMPUS CALCULATIONS YIELD ALL-SCHOOL 150TH PHOTO stand comfortably and also account for the variable sizes of the participants. They also considered the following questions. What font made the most sense to mark out the numbers? How should the number frame be placed in a photogenic way? Where will the sun be during the photo? All levels of math came into play as the class worked toward a recommendation. The students discussed and agreed on appropriate units and rounding guidelines, built scale models, calculated area, and solved many equations. Ultimately, this “problem” also gave the class a chance to take their learning off the page, get outside, and feel connected with their new peers (and teacher!) as we worked toward a common end. —Lacey Fredericks, Upper School mathematics teacher
At the start of the year, a colleague in the Communications Department asked if I could help with some calculations for an all-school photo with everyone forming a 150 in honor of our sesquicentennial celebration. My first thought was
The cover of this issue of McDonogh Magazine is the result of the Algebra II Honors students’ problem-solving skills. Their calculations confirmed and supported the work of the Grounds Crew who painted an outline of the numbers on the Rosenberg Campus Green.
that this would be a great “problem” for my Algebra II Honors students to solve. And it turned out they were up for the challenge! The students quickly began to assemble a list of all of the questions they would need to explore to decide the scale of the number frame. How many people would be in the photo? Where should the photo be taken? Our first thought was the football field, and we decided our unit of measure would be yards. We needed to know how many people could comfortably occupy a square yard; so we broke out the masking tape and had the class “occupy” a square yard. We quickly concluded that the football field was unnecessarily large and wondered if we could use the Rosenberg Campus Green. Because that space did not come with well-marked dimensions, we borrowed a few long measuring tapes from the Science Department and headed out to the Green.
measurements and wrestled with concerns about choosing a “people density” that would allow them to
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Students double- and triple-checked their Felix Mikhaylenko ’27, Nissa Rab ’26, and Derin Karunwi ’26 take field measurements.
