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 ›
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 ›
Yes, the Mission Hill trip was successful. Two weeks ago, I promised to tell you the results of our decision to replace Chinatown with Mission Hill as one of the eight Boston neighborhoods we visit each summer as part of… Read More ›
Significant digits can arise out of less significant data, right? For instance, you probably learned in ninth-grade science that a number rounded to one significant figure can be magically turned into one with three significant figures simply by changing measurement… Read More ›
What a great start for the Weston High School Math Team! In our first Massachusetts Math League meet of the year, our goal was a simple one: to beat Canton. Simple, but definitely not easy, as it almost never happens. And beat Canton… Read More ›
We had a productive workshop today, identifying and developing materials for using Desmos — primarily, but not exclusively, in Algebra 2 and Precalc 2. There are at least two different ways to use Desmos: as a graphing calculator that’s much better than… Read More ›
If you’re sufficiently geeky, you will surely want to know something unexpected about the mathematics of functions and their inverses: cryptography in the 15th Century. Why? Because then we’re focusing on the transition from the monoalphabetic ciphers (such as Caesar,… Read More ›
Wow! Look closely at this amazing image. What is it? Clearly [???] it’s an Ottoman calendar from a century ago. Fortunately, it has been annotated for our viewing pleasure. It shows the then current date — apparently April 20, 1911 —… Read More ›
A headline writer attached this misleading title to an opinion piece in the New York Times last Sunday. My response (this post) is yet another follow-up to the follow-up I posted on February 18. Apparently the issue just won’t go away! Andrew Hacker continues to… Read More ›
So…don’t do this! From Sam Shah:
