Congratulations to the Weston High School math team for their excellent showing in the state playoffs on Friday in Shrewsbury! We finished fourth in the state among medium-sized high schools (the schools with which we compete) and will therefore be… Read More ›
Math
The Seventh Annual Fractal Fair
Seven is a lucky number, so no one was surprised that the seventh annual Fractal Fair at Weston High School turned out to be the best one so far. Of course there were many great exhibits in each of the previous fairs, but… Read More ›
The Numbers Behind Numb3rs
My students sometimes ask me whether the mathematics in the television show Numb3rs is real. This question, among others, is explored in a fascinating book, The Numbers behind Numb3rs: Solving Crime with Mathematics, by mathematicians Keith Devlin and Gary Lorden…. Read More ›
Computational intractability
It’s been a stressful week here in Lake Wobegon, but February break is finally almost upon us; now I have a chance to catch up on things from the past few days. Of course it’s always nice to see the… Read More ›
The Strontium-90 Scenario
In all six sections of college-prep Algebra II (taught by three teachers, with two sections apiece), we have just completed a project in which each student has to understand a scenario (written by one of my colleagues), complete some mathematics… Read More ›
The Big Ideas of Algebra, Part Two
This post is a follow-up to my post of November 30, where I brought up two points that can illuminate one’s views on the big ideas of algebra: …we discussed the assignment of partial credit for work in solving a… Read More ›
What do I need to do to get an A?
“What do I need to do to get an A?” asks one of my students in an honors math course. I wish I had a magic recipe. I can say with reasonable confidence that it’s possible to get a B… Read More ›
Strip Search
Strip Search, by William Bernhardt, is an irritating novel. Why do I say that? Well, it’s not just because Bernhardt portrays math teachers as weird and psychotic, though that’s certainly a major part of it. And it’s not just because… Read More ›
Misreading Larry Summers
Continuing yesterday’s theme… There has been renewed interest in Larry Summers’s supposed sexist remarks. When Senator Obama (I almost said “President Obama”) announced that he would appoint Summers to be his senior White House economic advisor, bloggers and others revived… Read More ›
And they say that girls can't do math…
So why is it that the top two mathletes on Weston High School’s Math Team are freshmen girls? And a year young for their grade, at that? Check out the situation from ten months ago. But it’s only two data… Read More ›
Turn your iPhone into an ocarina.
I recently installed an unusual application on my iPhone: Ocarina. This program turns your iPhone into a four-hole ocarina, with the holes outlined on the iPhone’s touch-sensitive screen. But the really cool thing is that you actually blow into your… Read More ›
Teaching spreadsheets in high school math classes
Should high-school math classes be teaching Excel? Or, more generally, should we be teaching spreadsheet use — and Excel just happens to dominate the market? We have been exploring these issues at Weston High School. Certainly the right point of… Read More ›
The Big Ideas of Algebra, Part One
Earlier this month I participated in a fascinating two-day seminar on The Big Ideas of Algebra, taught by Deborah Hughes-Hallett and sponsored by Teachers as Scholars. Although I undoubtedly talked too much, I figure that that was because I had… Read More ›
Teaching RSA in high school
By this point I’ve taught simplified versions of the RSA algorithm to ten different cohorts of teens: four years’ worth of Honors Algebra II students at Weston High School, juniors for four summers at Crimson Summer Academy, and two years’… Read More ›
Interpreting political data
I want my CSA sophomores to understand many sorts of visual representations of data — tables, charts, graphs, etc. — especially in the context of elections, since we’re applying mathematics to models of voting. This summer, of course, we have… Read More ›
Supreme Musical Artists of the Past Fifty Years
As I mentioned in my post of four days ago, my sophomores at Crimson Summer Academy (CSA) are currently studying models of voting. While I’m trying to move them away from cuteness as a criterion and toward serious consideration of… Read More ›
MBTA fares steady in real dollars for 100 years
Take a close look at the yellow bars in this bar chart:Much to my surprise, it turns out that subway fares in Boston have remained nearly unchanged for 110 years when adjusted for inflation, especially when you ignore the short-lived… Read More ›
No surprise: they support Obama.
As I mentioned in my post of two days ago, the sophomore component of the summer course I teach at Crimson Summer Academy focuses on models of voting. Although the emphasis is primarily on applied mathematics, the 2008 course was… Read More ›
Amazing math applets
Check out the Lawrenceville School’s amazing math applets! They provide links to class-demonstration applets that range from the unit circle and the sine function through transformations and vector addition all the way to slope fields and Riemann sums — not… Read More ›
Double Vision
I have just finished reading Double Vision, by Randall Ingermanson. This science fiction thriller has a great concept, but the execution is disappointing. On the plus side, the novel speaks effectively to those of us who have worked in the… Read More ›
Learning Strategies 