It's really strange how some things stick in your memory, and get called up at odd times.
This morning, I'm prepping linear regression for my class, and I ran across the terms "ordinate" and "abscissa" in the textbook. (Are those terms even used much any more? With some of the students I have a hard enough time helping them remember "independent variable" and "dependent variable.")
But anyway. It brought back a vivid memory from fourth grade - math class, I think. My family was preparing to go to my paternal grandmother's for Thanksgiving (the next to last Thanksgiving we were to have with her, but we did not know that at the time).
I think I had to leave early and got an excused absence from school. The teacher said, as I was leaving, "Let me give you what we were going to do in math class tomorrow; it's really just a fun thing but you might like to do it."
It was a sheet of graph paper and a page of coordinates, with a color next to each group of coordinates.
I tended to like that kind of thing - it was math, it was sort of meditative once you figured out how to do it, and it involved art supplies.
At the end, if you did it right (and actually, I think there was a typo in the instructions), you got a picture of a turkey. Well, a rasterized picture anyway, kind of like the old 8-bit video game graphics. (Which were still in the future in 1978 or so, when I did this).
It's funny, though, how I can remember the old classroom, and the teacher stopping me as I headed out the door, and sitting at my parents' kitchen table the night before we left trying to figure the turkey picture out. (I think we also did more of those later on. I suppose it was a way to teach Cartesian coordinates to children or something).
Funny, I never wound up doing counted-cross-stitch (which has a similar way of doing things, except it's charted out rather than a list of coordinates). My few attempts involved me getting off-chart, and having to rip back work, and getting frustrated...
But I'm fairly sure we learned the terms "ordinate" and "abscissa" for the x and the y. I wonder if they're still used much, or if kids still make those kinds of pictures in school math classes.
2 comments:
I'm a bit younger than you (fourth grade was '87 or so) and I'd never heard those terms. It was all x and y axises. Maybe CA was more progressive?
Ah yes, I remember high-school math ;)
Re counted cross stitch: I learned very quickly that I need to baste a grid in running stitches onto my cloth before I start -- usually 10x10 stitches. Boring to do, but it means when I make a mistake later I catch it very quickly.
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