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Category: How people learn (or don’t)
Anything about how people learn — mostly how they learn maths — or how they get blocked from learning
Childhood memories
Two books I’ve read recently have encouraged me to investigate my memories from childhood. In Tracy Zager’s “Becoming the Math Teacher You Wish You’d Had“, she urged me to think about my maths autobiography to see what influenced my current feelings about maths. In Stuart Brown’s “Play“, he urged me to think about my play […]
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Money and me
In the online resources for Becoming the Math Teacher You Wish You’d Had, Tracy Zager provides information about the benefits of writing a “math autobiography”. I really have tried to do this, but I am having a lot of trouble organising my thoughs and memories. However, I reckon I can track some of my memories […]
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An opening gambit for the Numbers game
It was O’Week a couple of weeks ago, when new students arrive on campus to find out how uni works and the services they have access to. Our tradition for the last several years is to play Numbers and Letters on a big whiteboard out in public as a way to engage with students.
In case […]
Finding an inverse function
There is a procedure that people use and teach students to use for finding the inverse of a function. It goes like this (this image comes from page 10 of this document from Edexcel, but this pic is from Jo Morgan’s blog where I first saw it):
My problem with this is that it doesn’t make […]
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The Zumbo (hypothesis) Test
Here in Australia, we are at the tail end of a reality cooking competition called “Zumbo’s Just Desserts“. In the show, a group of hopefuls compete in challenges where they produce desserts, hosted by patissier Adriano Zumbo. There are two types of challenges. In the “Sweet Sensations” challenge, they have to create a dessert from […]
Problem strings and using the chain rule with functions defined as integrals
In Maths 1A here at the University of Adelaide, they learn the following theorem (this is taken from the lecture notes written by the School of Maths here):
It says that, given a function of x defined as the integral of an original function from a constant to x, when you differentiate it you get the […]
Quadrilateral family tree
I have always loved the naming of quadrilaterals, right from when I first heard about it in high school. I’m not entirely sure why, but some of it has to do with the nested nature of the definitions – I like that a square is a kind of rectangle and a rectangle is a kind […]
One reason I’ll still use pi
Every so often, someone brings up the thing with tau (τ) versus pi (π) as the fundamental circle constant. In general I find the discussion wearisome because it usually focuses on telling people they are stupid or wrong for choosing to use one constant or the other. There are more productive uses of your time, […]
Brackets
I had a meeting with an international student in the MLC on Friday who has having a whole lot of language issues in her maths class.
She was from the USA.
Yes, the USA. Her problem wasn’t the everyday English; it was with the different terminologies for mathematical things here compared to her experience where she comes […]
A Day of Maths 3: Zero Zeros
This is the third in a series about a Day of Maths I did in my daughter’s Year 7 classroom. I started back with The Best! Day! Ever! and then talked about Quarter the Cross. This post is about a puzzle I gave to students to fill in some time while their classmates finished off […]