Yesterday Mr. Bryden, our head custodian, came into my first period math class with a real problem. He had a bag of fertilizer and he was looking out the window at the peace garden planted in the lawn below. He was trying to determine how many bags of fertilizer he would need to fertilize the garden three times a year. Now, a peace garden is, of course, a circle (and we know how to calculate the area of a circle), but this circle has walkways cut out of the middle of it in the shape of a peace sign. Upon further inspection, we also discovered that there is a ring (think circumference) of shrubs around the outside, and the instructions on the fertilizer bags said to handle fertilizing those differently.

Well, we ARE a math class and we just happen to be in a geometry unit currently studying area and circumference of circles, so perhaps we can help Mr. Bryden out. We will be spending the next few days planning out how to solve this interesting real-world math problem and then actually solving it.