CoH celebrates National Poetry Month

Posted on by Denise Gaskins

National Poetry Month logoThis week’s Carnival of Homeschooling treats us to snippets of poetry along with a variety of informative, inspiring articles about education in general and homeschooling in particular. The Tutor writes:

It cannot be a coincidence that it is National Poetry Month and I’m hosting the Carnival of Homeschooling this month. I mean a homeschooler can never resist the chance to turn something into a learning opportunity. So, prepare a nice cup of tea, find a comfy spot, call the kids to come read over your shoulder, and let’s away to the Carnival!

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I —
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.
— from The Road Not Taken by Robert Frost

Continue reading CoH celebrates National Poetry Month

Carnival of Mathematics, ordinal 5

Posted on by Denise Gaskins

Carnival of MathematicsI missed getting an entry into the latest Carnival of Mathematics, which went up a day early at Science and Reason. (Serves me right for procrastinating!)

As usual, most of the articles are well over my head.

The carnival begins with a tribute to Field’s Medalist Paul Cohen (April 2, 1934 – March 23, 2007), the man who settled the first of the famous Hilbert Problems, the Continuum Hypothesis. Then come the math articles.

Here are my favorites:

  • The old new math
    In which JD teaches his algebra class a bit of twentieth-century history. If you aren’t familiar with Jonathan’s blog, be sure to spend some time browsing his “puzzle” posts.

Bill Gates Proportions II

Posted on by Denise Gaskins

[Feature photo above by Remy Steinegger via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.0).]

Another look at the Bill Gates proportion… Even though I couldn’t find any data on his real income, I did discover that the median American family’s net worth was $93,100 in 2004 (most of that is home equity) and that the figure has gone up a bit since then. This gives me another chance to play around with proportions.

So I wrote a sample problem for my Advanced Math Monsters workshop at the APACHE homeschool conference:

The median American family has a net worth of about $100 thousand. Bill Gates has a net worth of $56 billion. If Average Jane Homeschooler spends $100 in the vendor hall, what would be the equivalent expense for Gates?

Continue reading Bill Gates Proportions II

Putting Bill Gates in Proportion

Posted on by Denise Gaskins

[Feature photo above by Baluart.net.]

A friend gave me permission to turn our email discussion into an article…

Can you help us figure out how to figure out this problem? I think we have all the information we need, but I’m not sure:

The average household income in the United States is $60,000/year. And a man’s annual income is $56 billion. Is there a way to figure out what this man’s value of $1mil is, compared to the person who earns $60,000/year? In other words, I would like to say — $1,000,000 to us is like 10 cents to Bill Gates.

Continue reading Putting Bill Gates in Proportion

Skit: The Handshake Problem

Posted on by Denise Gaskins

[Feature photo above by Tobias Wolter (CC-BY-SA-3.0) via Wikimedia Commons.]

If seven people meet at a party, and each person shakes the hand of everyone else exactly once, how many handshakes are there in all?

In general, if n people meet and shake hands all around, how many handshakes will there be?

Our homeschool co-op held an end-of-semester assembly. Each class was supposed to demonstrate something they had learned. I threatened to hand out a ten question pop quiz on integer arithmetic, but instead my pre-algebra students presented this skit. You may adjust the script to fit the available number of players.

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Happy Pi Day I

Posted on by Denise Gaskins
photo by jorel314 (cc by 2.0)
photo by jorel314 (cc by 2.0)

It can be of no practical use to know that Pi is irrational, but if we can know, it surely would be intolerable not to know.

— Edward Titchmarsh

I don’t remember anyone ever mentioning Pi Day when I was in school, but any excuse to celebrate math sounds like fun. March 14 at 1:59 (a.m. or p.m.) is about as close as the calendar can get to 3.14159…

Continue reading Happy Pi Day I