For no particular reason i started thinking about math philosophically recently, and I came upon a thought that … well, I’ll just be honest … intrigues me. So, being interested in discussion, I guess I’ll just put it out there and see if this resonates with anyone. I was pondering the question: What is a [...]
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Guest Blog: Fun Way to Help Emerging Readers
From time to time I will include a Guest Blog post. Today’s Guest Blog author is Kathy Rappaport, a longtime educator and reading tutor. Here’s a fun way to get young children reading with greater fluency: engage them in the art of storytelling. Children generally love to tell stories, especially while they play with [...]
MathToons #2
Just an everyday conversation between variables …
Reader Input on Slope Post
A longtime reader of Turtle Talk, Jeff LeMieux, of Oak Harbor, WA, sent in a suggestion based on my post yesterday about positive and negative slope. Jeff found a way to help students remember not only positive and negative slope, but also the infinite slope of vertical lines, and the 0 slope of horizontal lines [...]
Helping Students REMEMBER the Difference in ‘LOOK’ Between Positive and Negative Slope
Some ideas just slap you in the face. I got slapped this morning as I was flying home from LA to Albuquerque. Those little cocktail napkins they hand out with “beverage service” often give me the urge to write. So this morning, nerdily enough, as I sipped my orange juice at 30,000 feet above the [...]
SAT and ACT Preparation
Every once in a while I get a call like this: “Hi, this is ____. My son is taking the SAT on Saturday. Can you, like, help him get ready for the test so he can score real high?” “Real high.” That’s what I wonder if the parent is. I’ve been tutoring students to prepare [...]
Front Page News (in the “Mathematical Tribune”)
They’ve done it! Mathematicians, using a network of interconnected computers, have discovered a new largest-ever-found prime number. Click here to “read all about it.”
Journey to the LCM … and Beyond!
In this blog/video I want to take you a little bit deeper into the world of … the LCM! Yes, that fascinating little mathematical entity is beckoning us to explore it further. Several readers wrote to me after I posted my LCM “trick,” saying they want to see me demonstrate WHY this “shortcut” works. One [...]
Problem of the Month – January 2013
Twelve is the first number with two pairs of factors (2 x 6 and 3 x 4). Primes, on the other hand, have no pairs of factors other than the trivial pair of one and the prime number itself. Considering that contrast, here’s an interesting fact about primes and the number 12. Add 12 to [...]
Cultivating original thinking
An interesting thing happened today. A girl I was working with, who’s had virtually no schooling in geometry, made a brilliant “leap” in a geometry problem. This student was starting a unit on fractions, and the curriculum was describing a standard way of conceptualizing fractions. The book was showing that if you divide a given [...]