500 (?) and Counting

Celebrate
Photo by rileyroxx.

Could this be my 500th post? That doesn’t seem possible, even counting all those half-finished-and-then-deleted drafts. Well, at least it is my 500th something, according to the WordPress.com dashboard. And surely a 500th anything is worth a small celebration, right?

Maybe my students aren’t so bad, after all…

It has been awhile since I posted a link to Rudbeckia Hirta’s Learning Curves blog. Here are a few of her students’ recent bloopers:

Continue reading 500 (?) and Counting

January Update

funny pictures

Are you getting ready for the big snowstorm — or is it balmy and nice where you live? For us, the weatherman is predicting 6 to 10 inches, plus drifting. Sounds like a great night to snuggle down with pizza and a movie, assuming the power doesn’t go out.

Major Blog Changes

January was a month of major and minor changes for Let’s play math! blog. My biggest change was moving my blogroll to a separate page. This move gave me enough room to comment on several of my favorite blogs, and I hope to add more notes over the next few months.

It also freed up space in my sidebar for my new Blog parties for teachers widget. (Scroll down to see it.) I was getting frustrated posting little blurbs every time a new blog carnival came out, only to see the posts become outdated within a week — those announcements were threatening to outnumber my on-topic blog posts. Aargh! Now I can post the latest links where they are easy to find, without diluting my main-column articles.

Continue reading January Update

I Need One of These!

Funny Pictures

It might really help with the 2008 Game. My morning coffee is not doing the job.

Blogging Notes

I confess: I am a FlyLady drop-out. Housecleaning has never been my strong point. But I read 50 Tips to Unclutter Your Blog, and I thought Skellie had some good points. I hate crowded sidebars, and moving my blogroll to a separate page sounded like a great way to declutter. If you want to browse some great blogs, the link is at the top of this page.

Now, I suppose, I should put my math notebook away and start clearing off the mess on my desk…

Best of “Let’s Play Math!” in 2007

Cooking class

Farewell to 2007. We have snacks on the table so we can munch the night away, and the little ones are giggling over their Barbies, thrilled at the prospect of more sugar than is good for them.

Beach party

The teenagers have launched their annual movie marathon. This year, it was the girls’ turn to invite friends over, so the men in my life have all found excuses to run into town.

Winter in Illinois

Meanwhile, I am hiding in my den, indulging myself in a sort of blogger’s nostalgia. Some of the following posts got a lot of attention when they were published, others not so much. Topics range from preschool to high school, Captain Kitten from kindergarten games to teaching fractions to Shakespearean insults, so I hope there is something to interest everyone.

[The photos are small so this article won’t take forever to load. Click on any picture to view a larger image.]

Continue reading Best of “Let’s Play Math!” in 2007

Math Bloggers Hall of Fame

photo by Mike Licht, NotionsCapital.com

What makes a great math blog? That depends on who is doing the judging, of course. Your list of Hall of Fame bloggers would surely be different than mine. But since this is my list, the qualifications were:

  1. The nominee had to catch my interest. The content couldn’t be too abstract or specialized (since I have forgotten almost all the math I learned in college), but it had to be mathy enough to draw me in.
  2. The blogger had to reward my reading time with good stories, thoughtful comments, imaginative puzzles, or really cool pictures — anything that kept me coming back and wishing for more.

So without further ado, the winners, listed alphabetically to avoid playing favorites among my favorites. Here are eleven of the best math-related blogs, the guys and gals who make me think:

Continue reading Math Bloggers Hall of Fame

The “I Rank #1 on Google!” Meme

David Ng started it. Kurt Van Etten improved it. And I heard about it from MathMom. Now, you’re invited to play, too. It’s fun!

Here Are the “Rules”

1. Search for your blog on Google. Try to find 5 different phrases that produce your blog as the hit.

2. You may enclose the search phrase in quotes if necessary, but a search without quotes is preferred.

3. Score your search phrases based on the total number of hits. As Kurt wrote:

The ideal search phrase would have your blog being number one out of something like a million hits returned. As it turns out, this is much easier to do than it might sound.

Continue reading The “I Rank #1 on Google!” Meme

Bloglines Potluck “Carnival”

Blog carnival graphic 2

One last, long weekend before we dive full-speed into school and co-op classes and swim lessons and karate and art lessons and…well, this may be my last chance to catch up on the backlog in my Bloglines folders.

With over 100 feeds, there is no way I will keep up with all of you during the school year. So here is my end-of-summer fling, a sort of unofficial “Best of (my) Bloglines” carnival, in which I share my personal favorites from the last few weeks of RSS.

I hope you enjoy these posts as much as I have.

Continue reading Bloglines Potluck “Carnival”

The Procrastinating Blogger Award

Procrastination is the art of keeping up with yesterday.

Don Marquis

Joyful Days kindly nominated me for the Thinking Blogger Award back in the days of the dinosaurs. Well, she isn’t that old, really — it was only last April. I am grateful to her for thinking of me, and ever since then I have been thinking deeply about whom to nominate in my turn. Or, to be more precise, I printed out the nomination post as a reminder, and then it got lost in a pile of “to sort/read/file” papers on a shelf under my desk…

Continue reading The Procrastinating Blogger Award