We have all seen cartoons of a character falling on a ladder away from a building. Many of us have also seen ladders fall straight down as evidenced in the picture on the right. Both of these events are due to misplacement of ladders. How do we know how to safely place a ladder? Students will use right triangle trig and the pythagorean theorem to investigate methods of setting up a ladder, sin, cos, tan, ratio, sine, cosine, tangent