This day, April 28th, 2014, will go down as a day of victory for high school math teachers everywhere.
Today, I applied SOC-CAH-TAO to a real life situation.
I know, I know. How did this happen?! you wonder, incredulously. See, there was this ladder... and a loft bed... and the legs on the loft needed to be cut, but the distance cut from the ladder was unknown.
Trial and error is a dangerous method to employ when cutting real life wood with a real life saw. The wisdom of that proverb "cut once, measure twice" hangs heavy when the object modified is a $300 bed frame and the consequence determines whether or not your new studio apartment will work for the next two years.
When first considering the problem, I felt the faded and lurking memory of the Pythagoras Theorem rise to the front of my memory like oil slicked across the water of my mind. Right-angle triangles floating on pages of old math books, taunting me with squared a's and b's equaling c's matching pencil drawn triangles. I quickly pushed the theorem away in search of a different solution.
I turned to Google. How do I cut an Ikea loft bed and ladder?
While the internet offered many parent opinions on whether the bed should be modified, it lacked concrete measurements, ratios, or equations to correctly make the cuts. Even with technology jumping in to dominate every area of my life, it appears I would still have to do my own thinking for my modification. So, remembering 10th grade math class and the quirky Mrs. Anderson, I now Google searched a refresher to SOC-CAH-TOA and a pattern for a printable protractor.
With a tape measure, pencil sketches, and my incredibly sad printable protractor, I am determining the length cut from the ladder of my loft bed given the decreased length in each of bed legs, not so unlike a test problem I worked out 15 years ago.
And, because I have to measure twice and cut once, I even have a method in place to check my work that involves a weight on a string and a leveler.
sigh
Math, today you win.
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