Maniac Mathematicians and Transformations

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   congruent      reflection      rotation      similar      symmetry      transformation      translation   
You may not want to read my story today. I’m angry! I think today was the hardest day ever! We learned several huge (but totally unnecessary) words! What I want to know is, if you slide a shape around, why can’t you just call it slide? What maniac decided to say that moving a shape up down or over was going to be called a ? It seems to me that slide is a fine word.
In class we learned that any change made to a figure’s position is called a . It would have been very easy to learn if the math people had just named stuff easier.
Take flipping. If you flip a shape and create a mirror image, do you get to call it a flip or a mirror? Of course not! You have to know that a flip or mirror image is called a . If you turn a figure around a point, do you get to call it a turn? Don’t be silly! The math people make you call a turn, .
Well, at least those words can be memorized and made easy with a little hard work and a couple of stops at Math6.org. I guess I shouldn’t complain - except I was really hoping to spend the entire evening playing stuff at CartoonNetwork.com.
What I really need help with is telling if two shapes are or not. The definition is easy enough, “figures that have the same shape but may or may not have the same size.” But the trick is that when they say same shape, they don’t mean general shape. We have to match up the sides in a ratio or fraction and we haven’t even started studying fractions yet! figures aren’t bad because they will always have the exact same size and it’s kind of hard to trick you when the shapes have to be exactly the same size.
Well, that’s enough ranting for today. I hope you’ll come back to read tomorrow because we will be studying . I think that should be fun because the book makes it look like this is all about drawing lines on shapes to make each half of the shape exactly the same or congruent. If we get to use scissors and stuff we should have a very good time.