Saw this tweet from Kate Nowak presentation today: When I saw the tweet I thought that it would be fun to take the other side this argument. As the day went on, though, that thought changed to I want to take the other side of that argument. I’ll begin with one of my favorite – … Continue reading In Defense of Short Stories
Last week Patrick Honner posed this clever geometry question on twitter: There were many wonderful solutions posted on Twitter and on Google+, and I wanted to highlight 3 of them as wonderful examples of mathematical reasoning. These are the kinds of fantastic ideas that really highlight the beauty in math to me. So, in the … Continue reading Patrick Honner’s construction challenge shows the beauty of math
Saw this interesting recommendation from Kate Nowak on Twitter last week: The book (and some extra patty paper) arrived today and it looks like it has some great activities. I found one that seemed fairly easy to implement and gave it a shot with both kids. The project is a little lesson about the perpendicular … Continue reading Patty Paper Geometry
[note: published w/o much of any editing because we were heading out for a Memorial day hike] Last week Kate Nowak tweeted about one of Art of Problem Solving’s contest prep programs: This program from AoPS is timed, another one called Alcumus is not. My kids practice with some of the AMC 8 and 10 … Continue reading The insane speed of the Mathcounts final
[post writing note – not much editing on this one. Long day today – I’m going to take a bubble bath instead of editing . . . .] After taking a day away from our Geometry book to work through a really nice set of exercises that Kate Nowak posted on twitter: Going through a … Continue reading Patrick Honner’s challenging parallelogram problem
Yesterday we had a really good talk about Pythagorean triples. My son struggled a little bit with the algebra, but I was happy to see that struggle since I think it represents what learning math really looks like. That post is here: What Learning Math Often Looks Like Today we talked a little more about … Continue reading What learning math sometimes looks like part 2
Last week Michael Pershan wrote an interesting article about exponentials that has had me thinking for days: http://www.rationalexpressions.blogspot.com/2014/05/exponentiation-is-like-place-value.html Fortunately I’ve got about 90 minutes on the bike back and forth to work each day, so that leaves plenty of time to think through talking about math with my kids. This time around I needed all … Continue reading Michael Pershan’s Exponential Post part 1 (of 3 maybe)
Mike's Math Page 