Math maven Denise Gaskins awakens parents’ and children’s minds to the beauty and wonder of mathematics.
Whether your children are homeschooling, unschooling, or attending a traditional classroom, Denise helps your family build deep understanding with games and activities for players of all ages.
She says, “As a homeschool mom who loves math, I want to help other homeschoolers see the variety and richness of the subject. Math is not just rules and rote memory. Math is like ice cream, with more flavors than you can imagine — and if all your children ever do is textbook math, that’s like feeding them broccoli-flavored ice cream.
“But if we can find a way to give our children a good taste of that Aha! feeling — the thrill of working through a challenging problem and figuring it out — then we won’t be able to keep them away from math.”
Denise has taught or tutored mathematics at every level from pre-K to undergraduate physics — which she describes as “Just one story problem after another. What fun!” Now she writes the popular blog Let’s Play Math, publishes a growing library of playful math books, games, and printable activities, and manages the quarterly Playful Math Carnival.
Homeschooling for more than a quarter century, Denise and her husband raised five children (and a veritable zoo of critters) in the rural countryside of central Illinois. Now her hobbies are Bible study, recreational math, and “reading anything I can get my hands on.”
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If there’s anything about math that stumps you, or has never made sense, or you’re simply curious about, she’d love to hear from you!
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Denise Gaskins on Writing (AI Disclaimer)
Denise explains…
I write by hand on a tablet, send the file to email, and then spend many hours tweaking the end result. Editing is my hobby. Forget all my other chores — right now, I need to play around with which word sounds right where, or whether a comma, parenthesis, or em dash looks better in this particular spot.
All mistakes and misspellings are my own. On sloppy days, the handwriting-to-text app can’t read my writing, and I fail to notice the error because my brain “sees” what it expects instead of what’s really there. But mostly it’s because I rewrite nearly every sentence at least three times, to try it in different places or to rearrange subordinate clauses, and then I lose track of which chunks I was moving and which words (or parts of words) stayed behind.
Nothing I write uses generative AI, because where’s the fun in that?
Well, someday I may use AI for brainstorming and organizing ideas. I haven’t tried it yet, but I hear from other writers that it can be a helpful tool — and I certainly have a slew of notes and snippets that need organizing.
And my transcription and grammar-checker apps probably have some AI built in. What doesn’t these days?
Also, they say AI knows how to do marketing copy, like the blurbs that go on the back of a book and the book descriptions for my store listings. Someday, AI agents might be able to handle all the businessy parts of publishing and selling books, they say — and managing the blog, cleaning up old posts, finding dead links, formatting new posts, adding alt text, all those details — and if they’re right, that sounds just fine to me.
But not for writing.
As William Zinsser said, “Writing is how we think our way into a subject and make it our own.” It’s the act of wrangling ideas into words that helps us understand exactly what we think. If I let AI do the writing for me, I would lose that process of clarification.
[Rant alert…]
No only that, but I resent the AI’s claiming for itself such things as the em dash, “not this but that” sentence construction, and the Rule of Three because I’ve been using those all my life (or at least since high school). It takes a lot of gall for the machine to scrape my 1,000+ blog articles — plus the rest of the Internet, all of literary history, and a gazillion pirated ebooks — and then dare to say, “You have to change your writing style, or else everyone will think you’re me.”
[End of rant.]
Oh, and the photos on the blog and on my book covers are licensed from standard stock-photo sites and claim to be human-created, though I may sometimes use simple AI editing tools to remove or extend backgrounds. Someday I may play around with AI art, but not so far…
(Except for one cute image of baby dragons playing a math game, which I made once upon a time and posted on Facebook just for fun. Experimenting with one of the free AIs way back when. Almost forgot that.)
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Denise Gaskins' Let's Play Math 