I attended the Anja S. Greer conference at Philips Exeter Academy last year and highly recommend it to anyone interested. Details of this year’s conference have just been published, so click on the image below for more information.
A recent eSchool News article by Meris Stansbury lists ten skills cited by its readers as being most important for today’s students to acquire:
Most folks learn to multiply increasingly complex quantities gradually over time, starting with constants in elementary school, and eventually continuing on to polynomials in high school. As the quantities become more complex, students master “the distributive property”, “collecting like terms”, and perhaps even procedures made more memorable with acronyms like “FOIL”.
When learning to multiply binomials and polynomials, people often focus more on the process than the reasoning behind it – which can makes things feel complex. Once you understand the reasoning, multiplying polynomials will hopefully become straightforward. And with a small measure of melodrama, I will describe “FFFT!”, a trivial technique with a silly name that can help make multiplying polynomials easy.
Steve Jobs spoke at the Stanford Commencement ceremonies in 2005. While his speech lasted only 15 minutes, it contains some wonderful advice – so I encourage you to click on this link to watch it. He will be sorely missed.
Suppose nobody had ever thought of measuring the size of an angle, and someone asked you “How can I describe the size of an angle?” What approach might you take in answering this question?
You might start by arbitrarily picking some angle, any angle, such as angle ABC in the image below, and call its measure “1″. All other angles could be Continue reading
Welcome to the 15th Mathematics and Multimedia Blog Carnival.
According to Wolfram Alpha, the word “fifteen” is the 379th most common spoken word. It is also the age of most High School Sophomores. I invite you to lean on your caffeine and cuisine, then careen between the following keen carnival fifteen postings on your screen.
Connections between math and real life; use of real-life contexts to explain mathematical concepts
Bon Crowder (Math Is Not a Four Letter Word) describes Continue reading
I am pleased to announce that Learning and Teaching Math will host the next Mathematics and Multimedia Blog Carnival. If you have a post that fits in one of the categories below which you would like considered for inclusion in this issue, please use the link at the end of this post to submit it before September 23, 2011.
This Blog Carnival focuses primarily on articles that Continue reading
An article in The Washington Monthly titled “The College For-profits Should Fear” describes the founding and growth of Western Governors University. It uses an on-line model with some twists:
People, both as children and adults, are constantly learning new things. The more actively engaged in the learning process they are, the more likely they are to learn something well and retain that knowledge. So what exactly is the person “teaching” a course doing? Their title implies that they are somehow loading knowledge into student brains. While that may fit the assumptions behind the “lecture model” of instruction, that is not the way learning works.
So what title is appropriate for people who:
- Decide on, or create a Continue reading
What was “the best” course you ever took? Probably one for which you had to work quite hard, one that you perceived as challenging from the outset, one for which you rose to the challenge. The course probably had a reputation as a tough course, so you probably added it to your schedule with care and made sure you did not take another really challenging course at the same time.
Major time commitments are regularly called for in schools: for musical or dramatic performances, athletic seasons, and some classes too. Could we improve the way such opportunities are scheduled so that Continue reading
Many widely used math textbooks seem written for a traditional “lecture-style” teacher. They can be challenging to teach from if you are trying to reduce time spent “talking at” the class.
Some of the NSF-funded mathematics texts published over the past decade make it much easier for a teacher to avoid lecture mode, but: Continue reading
What if most activities in school asked students to “reach and defend a conclusion”?
A New York Times Magazine article titled “Games Theory” (September 19, 2010) mentioned some interesting points:
- “going to school can and should be more like playing a game, which is to say it could be made more Continue reading
The 2011 Anja S. Greer Conference on Secondary School Mathematics at Phillips Exeter Academy provided many opportunities to hears others’ ideas about the purpose of our High School Mathematics Curriculum. Some of the statements I noted were (with apologies that none are exact quotes, and my lack of attribution on some):
In life, not to mention just about any academic subject, students should Continue reading
A continuum of activity types are used in classrooms around the world. They range in duration from long (weeks or months) to short (seconds or minutes), from “projects” to “problems”. There are differing styles of activities, ranging from context-rich to almost context-free. There are also differing roles for activities in a curriculum: they can serve as warm-ups, practice, assessment, and/or a primary means of instruction (as at Phillips Exeter Academy and elsewhere).
The activities that seem most effective to me tend to Continue reading
