I finally get it — you don’t have to worry about memorizing a bunch of formulas if you just understand where they come from. You can always figure them out again.
— unidentified student in Doug’s class
from the comments on Kate’s post Formulas? What Formulas?
Quotable: Teaching
Teaching any subject has a funny way of educating the teacher at least as much as the student.
— Chris Birk
How I Became a Better Writer Thanks to Distracted, Hungover College Kids
We all know it already, but I like the way he said it, and the blog post is worth reading. I wish this guy was teaching my college kids. Heck, my college kids wish he was teaching them — or at least, they wish that their teachers valued tight writing and would “coat undergraduate papers in ink.”
Math Teachers at Play #24
[Photo by internets_dairy.]
Welcome to the Math Teachers At Play blog carnival — which is not just for math teachers! If you like to learn new things and play around with ideas, you are sure to find something of interest. Let’s start the mathematical fun with an arithmetic card game in honor of our 24th edition and a few number puzzles:
Quotable: Make Them Laugh
You have to make them laugh. You must never underestimate the power of laughing in a maths classroom.
— Carol Roberts
quoted in Laughing lesson Adult learning
Or, as Donald O’Conner put it:
I think this is my biggest failing as a teacher: I am too much the straight man.
Quotable: Problem Solving
I do my best to make my students think, but they still try to become good little algorithm followers.
Quotable: College Majors
Discovered this in my blog reader this morning, and I thought you would enjoy it, too.
[Note: Stu is not the person’s real name, but is short for “student.”]
Stu came to my office looking for a new major. Stu is bad at math and can’t handle the math sequence required of business majors. So Stu was wondering what majors require the lowest level math sequence that counts towards graduation.
I listed a few.
Stu was disappointed. Stu pointed out that you don’t usually think about people in those fields as making a lot of money. Stu lamented that everything that is in demand requires math.
— Rudbeckia Hirta
Learning Curves blog
Quotable: Politics
“Let’s give the governor a break,” says Williams College mathematician Edward Burger. “If nothing else, he’s encouraging math education.”
— Carl Bialik
Coincidental Obscenity Deemed Extremely Dubious
Math Teachers at Play #5
[Photo by Alex Kehr.]
Welcome to the Math Teachers At Play blog carnival — which is not just for math teachers! If you like to learn new things and play around with ideas, you are sure to find something of interest. Let the mathematical fun begin…
Math = Letting Dead People Do the Work
WordPress.com bloggers have a new toy: the ability to embed TED talks…
How DO We Learn Math?
What makes it possible to learn advanced math fairly quickly is that the human brain is capable of learning to follow a given set of rules without understanding them, and apply them in an intelligent and useful fashion. Given sufficient practice, the brain eventually discovers (or creates) meaning in what began as a meaningless game.
— Keith Devlin
Should Children Learn Math by Starting with Counting?
It seems obvious that our children must have a wide range of experience with real world objects before counting, addition, or subtraction mean anything to them. But are other topics, such as calculus, better learned as abstract rules — as a game that we play with symbols? And what about the topics in the middle? For instance, how best can we break our algebra students of common errors such as distributing the square or canceling out addition terms?
To teach effectively, I need to understand how students learn. Do different approaches work best with different concepts? Or at different ages or stages of development? I can think of at least 3 ways that I have learned math — what about you? How do you and your children learn?
Denise Gaskins' Let's Play Math 