It began with some 4th-8th grade friends who met in my dining room to work math puzzles and play games. At first, a few of the kids wondered how anyone could have fun with math. But we did enjoy ourselves, and Math Club grew until we couldn’t fit anyone else around the table.
Carnival of Mathematics #6
The new Carnival of Mathematics is up and running at Modulo Errors. Highlights for me included:
Teaching Math
One opinion about when to introduce formal arithmetic (workbooky math) to children. What is the opportunity cost of too-early mathematics?
Criss-Cross Multiplication
An algorithm for two-digit multiplication that is easier for mental math.
Party For Polyglots
A brain teaser puzzle, not too difficult.
Coloring Knots
A topological doodling project.
Thou Surly Bat-Fowling Hugger-Mugger!
Here is another highlight from my “To blog about it someday” folder: the Shakespearean Insulter. What fun!
There’s no room for faith, truth, nor honesty in this bosom of thine.
It is all filled up with guts and midriff.Taken from: Henry IV, part I
And if you are interested in actually studying the bard, here are some links you may enjoy:
Shakespeare. Yes, again. And again.
Advice on teaching Shakespeare to children.Bardolatry
Many links to teaching advice, book recommendations, and more.
There is no reason to put off Shakespeare until your student reaches high school. My then-kindergardener enjoyed the Trevor Nunn version of Twelfth Night so much that she wanted to get her hair cut, “So I can pretend to be a boy.” This is homeschooling at its best: each of us learning at our own level — and loving it.
The “Are You a Homeschooler?” Quiz
It is spring cleaning week at our house, and I thought I’d do some virtual cleaning, too. So from a folder where I stuff the “To blog about sometime” websites comes this quiz. It claims to determine whether you deserved your high school diploma — Ha! There is no way I could remember anything from that long ago.
So tell me, what did the quiz really measure?
Happy Birthday, Sweet 17!
I described in a previous post our family tradition of hiding one present on each child’s birthday. Today’s hidden present rhyme was more successful than recent ones — the birthday girl was temporarily stumped and needed a hint from her older sister. Can you guess where they found the gift?
As always, the outside of the envelope is the same:
I’m your last present.
Can you find me?
I’m hiding some place
That you can’t see…
Twaddle-Free Math Handouts
For anyone who can’t make it to Peoria this weekend but is still interested in my math workshops — and just in case we run out of handouts at said workshop — I am posting my math handouts here. These are pdf files, so if you have a sluggish dial-up connection like ours (ah, the joys of rural life!), you can right-click and save each file as a download.
CoH celebrates National Poetry Month
This 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
Carnival of Mathematics, ordinal 5
I 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:
- How Dr. Seuss would prove the halting problem undecidable
In which we find a delightful informal proof that the Halting Problem is undecidable. Wouldn’t it be fun if all math proofs could be written in Dr. Seuss-style verse?</
ul>
- 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
[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?
Putting Bill Gates in Proportion
[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.
Denise Gaskins' Let's Play Math 
