Congratulations to the Weston High School Math Team for their extraordinary performance yesterday in the medium-sized high schools’ playoffs for the Massachusetts state math championship! Weston finished #1 among all the medium-sized schools in all the state math leagues, and far… Read More ›
Math
Finally… the 16th Annual Fractal Fair
Our plans for the 16th annual Fractal Fair at Weston High School looked good. All was supposed to go smoothly, just as the previous 15 fairs had. Why not, after all? But the weather did… Read More ›
Spirals & fractals at the MoS
Another museum visit on my staycation was to the Museum of Science: the special exhibit Numbers in Nature, continuing through April 25. My capsule summary is that it is generally high in quality but low in quantity. Yes, I agree that… Read More ›
Should you take the math course you want to take?
A brief anecdote posted by The Math Curmudgeon and a comment from a reader a couple of days ago raise two different but interlocking issues: how do you take school administrators seriously when they directly contradict themselves, and should students… Read More ›
Homework and Causation
As this academic year ramps up, it’s worth recalling a conversation overheard by a colleague a couple of years ago: At the beginning of the third quarter, two sophomores were talking about their second-quarter report cards. “I got a C… Read More ›
Why “Names of polygons”?
Whenever I go to the WordPress Stats page for this blog, I see that my most popular post (most popular by far) is “Names of Polygons,” which I posted on December 10, 2010! It had 361 views last month, nearly… Read More ›
Ancient Babylonian trigonometry? Really? Really???
It’s pretty clear what this clay tablet says, right? Obviously it’s written in… Oh, wait, maybe it isn’t so obvious. You probably don’t read Babylonian, or Akkadian, or Sumerian, or whatever language these cuneiform carvings represent. But this tablet has… Read More ›
Do negative numbers exist? And why do two negatives make a positive?
A brief interchange on Facebook yesterday and today with three of my former students prompted this discussion of the two questions stated in the title of this post. It all started with this implausible claim from a reliable math website:… Read More ›
“If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it?” (Rethinking quadrilaterals)
Why on earth would we spend two whole days rewriting our Honors Geometry quadrilaterals unit? Our textbook, after all, contains a perfectly serviceable sequence of four lessons on this topic: These lessons are adequate. In the words of the standard… Read More ›
Coding in middle school math
Google Blockly? What’s that? And should we say coding or computer programming? We’ll deal with that terminological question in the last paragraph, but let me first tell you about Blockly and about the workshop we had yesterday. A group of… Read More ›
