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Monthly Archives: May 2011
Rule collision
The same experience has happened to me several times in the Maths Drop-In Centre recently — with different students from different courses — and it was such a strong pattern I need to talk about it.
The students are doing some algebra involving negative powers on the tops of fractions. Something like this:
Now they remember this […]
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Rapunzel’s Epiphany
We bought Disney Studio’s newest film “Tangled” on the weekend and I have to say it’s one of my favourite movies ever. It’s certainly Disney’s best movie since “Beauty and the Beast”, and I dearly loved “Beauty and the Beast”. I should warn you now that in order to say what I want to say […]
Not quite the bisection method
In various first year maths courses here, the students learn the “bisection method” for finding zeros of continuous functions. (A zero of a function is a number that makes the answer of the function come out to zero — it’s therefore also a point where the graph of the function crosses the x-axis.) It’s based […]