On Pi Day…
In my seventh grade class, I had to forge forward with the curriculum, but I came up with something great to punctuate the class work with. We have been working with areas of geometric shapes (specifically circles), radicals, and the pythagorean theorem. One day, a few days before Pi Day, I drew The Perfect Circle on the whiteboard. They were impressed. I was lucky — but I didn’t play it off as luck, but practice and skill. I rehearse, I told them.

That night, I sent them this video over email:

And again, they were impressed. So I decided that in honor of Pi Day, I would hold a freehand circle drawing contest. They came to class psyched. One said he had practiced drawing circles in the air so much that his arm hurt, and another used a whiteboard marker on a mirror. We forged forward, and as we worked, we punctuated the class with the competition (3 students at the board at a time; the winner of each round got to compete in the final championship round).

The winner of the contest got to create — with me — the bonus problem for the next test.