It’s been nearly two weeks since the blog carnival website sent me any articles for the MTaP carnival. If you tried to submit a entry for the carnival this week or last, I probably didn’t get it. Feel free to email me directly!
In the meantime, I’ve combed Google Reader and collected a nice assortment of posts for this week’s Math Teachers at Play — but there is still room for more.
Off-topic for a math blog, but vitally important:
Sometimes the most common indication that someone is drowning is that they don’t look like they’re drowning. They may just look like they are treading water and looking up at the deck. One way to be sure? Ask them, “Are you alright?” If they can answer at all – they probably are. If they return a blank stare, you may have less than 30 seconds to get to them. And parents — children playing in the water make noise. When they get quiet, you get to them and find out why.
If something like that seems unlikely to you, then you’d be right. Bucket drownings don’t happen often. But when they do, the parents involved never care how rare the event is for everyone else. Something very similar to the events described above happened just last month in Indiana. There was another bucket drowning reported in Illinois the month before that.
Also worth your time:
Wow! And to think, I was proud of myself for finishing a crochet afghan. Once.
Chain several. Leave straight to work in rows, or connect into a loop. Single crochet until your patience runs out, increasing every nth stitch (add an extra sc in the same place). Experiment with different colors and patterns. This pdf will give you more ideas.
The more frequently you increase, the frillier your hyperbolic plane will be, while a less-frequent increase makes it easier for students to see the structure. Daina Taimina recommends a 12:13 ratio (increase after every 12th stitch) for classroom use.
Hat tip: 2010 MAA Found Math Gallery, Week 45, and authentic arts by jenny hoople for the pdf.
It happens this way every summer: I think that when school’s out, I’ll have time to catch up on things. But school is never out, because we’re homeschoolers — and something else always comes up to make us even more busy than normal. This year, an emergency forced dh to move his engineering office from town to home. It’s great to have him close at hand, but spring cleaning has turned into a total house reorganization to make room.
In the meantime, this month’s Math Teachers at Play carnival is coming home to my blog, so I’d better get to work on that. If you would like to share a blog post about learning, teaching, or just playing around with math, I’d love to have you send it in. Just click here and fill out the handy automatic submission form.
Update, July 2011: Niner wrote a blog post on the turtles, with photos. Kitten had one of her babies die (sad!) but the other grew up enough to be released into the woods across the creek.
Welcome to the May 20, 2011 edition of Math Teachers at Play. Before beginning the carnival, let us have some interesting facts about 38.
- The sum of the squares first three primes
- The number of years it took the Israelites to travel from Kadesh Barnea to the Zered valley in Deuteronomy
- There number of surviving plays written by William Shakespeare
- The atomic number of strontium
- Thirty seven and 38 are the first pair of consecutive positive integers not divisible by any of their digits.
Now, let the carnival begin!
This blog originally grew out of my books, and now it’s coming full circle: New, expanded editions of my long-out-of-print books are ripening on the vine, growing out of the blog. To bring them to harvest, I’m going to need your help.
I’m working on the games books first because I think they will be the most helpful supplements to any math program.
The new Math Teachers at Play blog carnival is ready for your browsing pleasure:
Welcome to the 37th edition of the Math Teachers at Play blog carnival. I’m delighted to host the carnival here this month at Maths Insider!
For those new to the Math Teachers at Play carnival, this carnival celebrates some of the best maths teaching articles written by teachers, parents and bloggers each month. …
In keeping with tradition, I’ve presented a “37″ puzzle and some interesting arithmetic facts about the number 37 below. …
As I was checking through archive posts and clearing out the dead links, I found a couple of links that I thought would be dead but which are still good. So I am re-posting them here, for your browsing pleasure:
CurrClick (which carries the Math Mammoth workbook series) is offering Quotations from Shakespeare’s Plays as a free download. This ebook includes copywork tips from Charlotte Mason and about 30 pages of passages from Macbeth, King Lear, Much Ado About Nothing, etc.
[And if you are planning a study of the Bard, you won’t want to miss the many other Internet resources in my original post.]
What does it take to lead your nation through a crisis? Character, determination, wisdom, the courage of your convictions. What can we learn about leadership from those who have been there, done that?
Abraham Lincoln and Winston Churchill are two of these great leaders — men whose courage and conviction took their nations through challenging moments and forever altered the course of Western civilization…
The Teaching Company (one of my favorite resources for homeschooling high school) is offering two free lectures for the downloading: Great Leaders: Abraham Lincoln and Winston Churchill.
[More details in my original post.]
With news reports of radiation from Japan being found from California to Massachusetts — and now even in milk — math teachers need to help our students put it all in perspective.
xkcd to the rescue!
Pajamas Media offers a brief history of radiation, plus an analysis of our exposure in Banana Equivalent Doses:
And the EPA offers a FAQ:
[T]he levels being seen now are 25 times below the level that would be of concern even for infants, pregnant women or breastfeeding women, who are the most sensitive to radiation… At this time, there is no need to take extra precautions… Iodine-131 disappears relatively quickly in the environment.
— Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC)
pages 4-5 of EPA FAQ
[Hat tip: Why Homeschool.]
In the course of my bloggy spring cleaning, I’ve made some terrible discoveries. Some of my favorite resources have disappeared off the internet. Or perhaps they’ve moved, and I just haven’t found their new homes.
Do you know where these websites went?
This irreverant romp through the history of mathematics by W. W. O. Schlesinger and A. R. Curtis was read to the Adams Society (St. John’s College Mathematical Society) at their 25th anniversary dinner, Michaelmas Term, 1948.
Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine found a copy, but I’d love to replace this link with the article’s new location:
[Warning: Do not attempt to read this article while drinking coffee or other spittable beverage!]
Update: James Clare found the article’s new home here. Thank you!
Denise Gaskins' Let's Play Math 