The Carnival of Mathematics is back:
There is a nice balance of articles. My favorite comes from a new blog (just started this month!): The Numbers Go Social Networking.
A winner has been announced and a solution posted for last week’s Monday Math Madness:
Watch for the new puzzle coming next Monday at Wild About Math!
And don’t forget: The next installment of Math Teachers at Play opens next Friday, May 1, at I Want to Teach Forever. To contribute, use this handy submission form.
Considering how many fools can calculate, it is surprising that it should be thought either a difficult or a tedious task for any other fool to learn how to master the same tricks… Being myself a remarkably stupid fellow, I have had to unteach myself the difficulties, and now beg to present to my fellow fools the parts that are not hard. Master these thoroughly, and the rest will follow. What one fool can do, another can.
For years, I have recommended Calculus Made Easy as summer reading (and future reference) for high school or college students headed into a calculus course — and for the parents of those students, who may have studied calculus in ages past and now need to dredge out the dust bunnies of memory so they can help with homework.
The original book (second edition) is now out of copyright and available for free online:
[Hat tip to Sam and Michael for finding the Scribd version, which set me off searching for a clearer copy.]
My high school class ended the year with a review of multiplying and factoring simple polynomials. We played this matching game, and then I gave them a puzzle worksheet. I liked this idea, but I didn’t like the decoded answer. In my opinion, puzzles should give the student a “reward” for solving them — maybe a joke or riddle or something — but that answer seemed almost like nagging.
So I changed things around to make my own version:
[Photo by Alex Kehr.]
Welcome to the Math Teachers At Play blog carnival — which is not just for math teachers! If you like to learn new things and play around with ideas, you are sure to find something of interest. Let the mathematical fun begin…
WordPress.com bloggers have a new toy: the ability to embed TED talks…
[Photo by Betsssssy.]
Tom DeRosa of I Want to Teach Forever told me that he would love to have homeschool teachers or unschoolers contribute to his 52 Weeks, 52 Teachers Project. Just write a short response to the question:
Continue reading Calling Homeschoolers: Teaching Advice Wanted
[Photo by Untitled blue.]
Or don’t you know that all of us
who were baptized into Christ Jesus
were baptized into his death?We were therefore buried with him
through baptism into death in order that,
just as Christ was raised from the dead
through the glory of the Father,
we too may live a new life.
[Photo by daveduke.]
You see, at just the right time,
when we were still powerless,
Christ died for the ungodly.Very rarely will anyone die for a righteous man,
though for a good man
someone might possibly dare to die.But God demonstrates his own love for us in this:
While we were still sinners,
Christ died for us.
[Photo by miss karen.]
Need to pass that math test? Better stock up on chocolate. According to a recent study:
Mental arithmetic became easier after volunteers had been given large amounts of compounds found in chocolate… They were also less likely to feel tired or mentally drained…
[Hat tip: Joanne Jacobs.]
My daughter Kitten strongly dislikes math when forced to do it on her own, so I am trying to get back into the habit of doing “Buddy-Style Math” with her. We take turns working the problems in her workbook: mine, hers, mine, hers, and so on down the page. We work each problem out loud, explaining how we got the answer and checking each other as we go.
In a way, it is like Charlotte Mason-style narration applied to math, since my daughter has to process her thoughts in order to explain how she worked the problem, which fixes the math concepts more deeply in her mind.
Continue reading Buddy-Style Math: Doing Homework Without Tears
Denise Gaskins' Let's Play Math 