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.
Secret Message
My algebra students could stand to hear this, too:
(2)(-4x2)n is not equal to (-8 )nx2n.
AAAAAARRRRGGGHH!!!!
From Secret Message to My Calculus Students at Learning Curves blog.
Hexa-Trex Puzzles
These puzzles look like a lot of fun for whole number and integer arithmetic review. I think they would make a great warm-up at the beginning of a class or math club meeting.
Hat tip: MathPuzzle.com
Skit: The Handshake Problem
[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.
Nothing Is Everything
Does this proof at squareCircleZ blog mean that, if I get nothing done today, I can cross off everything on my list?
Poetry for Pi Day
Here are two poems in honor of pi, from the Mathematical Poetry site:
