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Category: Thoughts about maths thinking
Anything about the thinking processes required to learn and do maths, especially those about problem-solving and communicating.
Who is worthy to ask stupid and smart questions?
This post was going to be part of the Virtual Conference of Mathematical Flavours, which you can see all the keynote speakers and presentations here: https://samjshah.com/mathematical-flavors-convention-center/. The prompt for all the blog posts that are part of this conference is this: “How does your class move the needle on what your kids think about the doing of math, or what counts as […]
TMC Crochet Coral Quietness
Here is another blog post in my series of only-a-year-late posts about Twitter Math Camp 2017 (TMC17). In this one I want to talk about the Crochet Coral workshops Megan and I did, but I don’t want to actually talk about the crochet coral. Instead I want to talk about the quietness.
TMC was a wild wild […]
The unexpected fear of statistics
Statistics is the cause of a lot of fear. There are thousands of students studying psychology, sociology, economics, biology, medicine, animal science and education who thought they would be free of mathematics and suddenly discover they have to deal with statistics. In the case of psychology it is absolutely everywhere: both in whole courses about statistics, […]
Remainders remain a puzzle
My first post of 2018 is a record of some rambling thoughts about remainders. I may or may not come to a final moral here, so consider yourself warned.
What has prompted these ramblings today was reading this excellent post by Kristin Gray about her own thoughts on division and remainders. In that post, I saw […]
The Arts students’ maths brain
Yesterday I talked about one of the common responses to people finding out I am a mathematician/maths teacher, that of saying, “I’m not a maths person.” The other common response I get is, “I don’t have a maths brain.” (John Rowe mentioned this in his comment on the previous post.)
This is how I reacted last […]
Actually, I am a maths person
I am a mathematician and a maths teacher. Therefore it is an occupational hazard that any random person who finds out what my job is will respond with “I’m not a maths person.” The most frustrating people are my own students who I am trying to tell that my actual job is to help them […]
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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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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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How I choose which trig substitution to do
What trig subsitution is
Trig substitution is a fancy kind of substitution used to help find the integral of a particular family of fancy functions. These fancy functions involve things like a2 + x2 or a2 – x2 or x2 – a2 , usually under root signs or inside half-powers, and the purpose of trig substitution […]