A Pile of Organs

The TOPS grade 10 science class inhaled deeply as they dove into the breathtaking world of respiratory, digestive, and other body systems, much of it in preparation for a frog dissection later in the semester. This week, they finished examining the enzymes, processes, and organs involved in digestion and respiration, including connections between the two systems.

Functioning…Or Not?

With the end of a lengthy, proof-filled analytic geometry test this week, the functions unit began—the TOPS grade 10 math class entered the world of interval notation, parabolas, and lines while also facing the return of unions, intersections, and set builder notation. They examined relations, domain and range, and the vertical line test, all in preparation for the functions course …

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Lining Up

What happens when the TOPS grade 10 math class wants to minimize the weight of the food they bring to school while keeping calories above 1000? We use linear programming, of course. After an intense scuffle with matrices and Cramer’s rule, we found ourselves graphing constraints, sketching objective functions, shading in graphs, and finding points of intersection—all to find the …

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Mastering Memoirs

Recently, the TOPS Grade 9 English class took a look at memoirs in preparation for writing their own. The class annotated and had an in-depth discussion about famous memoirs, including Cheryl Strayed’s “Wild” and “Me Talk Pretty One Day” by David Sedaris, examining the tones, themes, figurative language, etc. of successful authors.