We workers use our brains in ways not naively perceived. A fully orange vested member of a NYC local owns many things:

• a living wage to raise a family,
• all the bennies
  • pension
  • health/life insurance
  • annuities
  • a functional local union
  • a free lifetime education
  • but most importantly,

Respect

Most locals require you to pass a math test. To make the powers that be happy, si, but also because trades math is in situation — you need to think on your feet, not fingers, applying math techniques that most people at best forgot about years ago — skills justifying a journeyperson’s six figure salary.

My objective for you, if you choose to accept it, is to offer my skills to help all of you become journeypersons.

Today, we’re going to look at a classic trades math skill: Feet & Inches.

Updated update! 9/29: Click on ‘final grades’ to see what you got right/wrong. Ms. Kim has your course scores. Any questions for me, I’ll be looking at the ‘typos’. But not now! The ubercrawl will be docked the rest of the week. Radar will be back up next Monday.

Update 9/28: (hopefully) all scores from day 1 to date are updated.

Update noon 9/27: The blueprint, percent, units and carbon footprint homeworks have been assessed and uploaded to the grades page. Tomorrow I will update everything prior to the midterm.

Update noon 9/24: All links are clean, reference materials on the side menu, carbon footprint and answer forms are all up. All typos so far have been answered.

and fix the links!

nuf sed!

stay toond!

Even though adding feet and inches is easy on its own, juggling the sides of irregular shapes makes those calculations more difficult. The same is true about today’s lesson: adding/subtracting fractions to figure out how far a penny sized nail will go through the wall, or which drill bit you will need for making a countersink hole.

If you felt frustrated with last week’s green math problems, your feelings probably didn’t stem from the math itself, which was nothing more than punching in three numbers, the times and equal buttons on your calculator. More likely, the problem was finding the right numbers to punch. Not knowing how to find them in an online environment invariably leads to a lot of mouse clicking. How to “quit the clik,” and quickly find the right numbers?

The vocabulary of green math, like organic chemistry — the U-factors, heat capacities, spec sheets — is like trying to find the right number on a piece of paper written in a foreign language. But that’s exactly what trades math is, no textbook, feet on a worksite, hand on your toolbox, trying to use what’s under your helmet to figure out answers to questions barked at you by your foreperson, while the din of construction vibrates your very bones. Overcoming your frustrations, finding the right numbers, that alone will justify your journey’d six-figured salary. Trades math = career security, for you and your family. Trades math is real.