[Rescued from my old blog.]
My computer and I seem to have come to a temporary truce: I pretend I’m never going to shut it off again, and it pretends it’s always going to come back if I do have to reboot. (Nope, no new computer in the offing at this point. We’re just at a cease fire here, until the next big thunderstorm throws a power outage at us…) So I thought it was high time for me to get back into the habit of blog posting.
Continue reading I’m Ba-a-a-ack! (Math Quotes of the Week I)
[Rescued from my old blog.]
Well, my computer is still being rebellious, so I’m at dh’s office again to check e-mail while the kids are gone to karate. But I thought it was high time I got another entry up on the blog…
One of my favorite activities for Math Club is to have my students write their own story problems. Then we pass the problems around so everyone can try to solve them. With all the discussion of problem solving on the math forum lately, I thought it would be fun to extend the challenge to you all. Can you come up with a word problem for us to practice our problem-solving skills on?
[Rescued from my old blog.]
Eldest dd had her first calculus lesson last night: derivatives. The teacher found the speed of a car at a given point by using the distance function, calculating the average speed over shorter and shorter time intervals. Dd summarized the lesson for me:
“If you want to divide by zero, you have to sneak up on it from behind.”
Of course, she understands you can’t really divide by zero, but I thought her tongue-in-cheek comment was a pretty good description of the process of finding the limit as delta-t approached zero.
[Rescued from my old blog.]
I have been reading up on Charlotte Mason’s teaching style, and I plan to incorporate more copywork and dictation into our school program next year. Here are a few of my favorite funny quotes about math. (These would also make great blackboard quotes for a math classroom.)
[Rescued from my old blog.]
Rudbeckia Hirta over at Learning Curves submits a great idea for a new TV blockbuster:
I’ve read that Charlotte Mason used oral exams like this with her students, though of course without the pressure and sarcastic comments. I’d love to hear how this works in “real life.”
[Rescued from my old blog.]
My youngest daughter wanted to do Singapore math today. Miquon Red is her main math text this quarter, but we add a bit of Singapore Primary Math 1B whenever she’s in the mood. We turned to the lesson on subtracting with numbers in the 30-somethings. The first problem was pretty easy for her:
30 – 7 = []
I reminded her that she already knows 10 – 7. She agreed, “10 take away 7 is 3.” Then her eyes lit up. “So it’s 23! Because there are two tens left.”
Denise Gaskins' Let's Play Math 