Month: February 2011
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A 90-yard punt ; Quadratics
So upon my call last week for quadratic activities, I got a ton of resources in my inbox. I’ll post them soon after I’ve had a chance to look through them. Until then, here’s something I cooked up that could go several different directions, depending on your students’ needs. Artifact This terribly grainy video of…
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Can someone help me with my 5-year-old daughter’s Math homework? (Part 2)
So remember the first part of my quandary about my kid’s math homework from this morning? Well, now I’m on the next question and I’m stuck again. I’m not sure what “do we see” means. Does it mean how many hats of the 17 do they both see? That could mean this. Then again, “hats…
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Brainstorming Quadratics
I’d like to do for Quadratics what we did with Pythagorean’s Theorem. I put out the call on Pythagorean’s Theorem and had come up with several ideas, only a couple of which were by me. So I’m putting up the bat signal again. Except in this case it’s the quadratic formula signal and asking for…
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Can someone help me with my 5-year-old daughter’s Math homework?
I’m being serious. It’s due tomorrow and I have no idea how to answer the following question. Now, the answer to this is obviously “four.” The narrator has four cats. The number of cats his or her friend has is irrelevant to the question. I’m just not sure how to fill in the pictures and symbols. Here’s…
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Please give your students this quiz, and how big is a “bushel” anyway?
(h/t: Freakonomics blog) The following is an actual test given to 8th grade students in Kansas in 1895, unearthed by the Salina Journal. Please refer to the “arithmetic” section. Here are the “arithmetic” questions and my attempted responses: 1. Name and define the Fundamental Rules of Arithmetic. Umm….. Please Excuse My Dear Aunt Sally? 2.…
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The Wacky Algebra of NFL Passer Rating
Artifact The following formula calculates NFL Passer rating. (wiki) (note: each component has a predetermined MAX and MIN value that appeared to be pulled out of thin air.) Personally, I would simply present this equation to students at the beginning of class and let them stare at it a while and try to figure some…
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The Pizza Casbah 30-inch pizza challenge
This is a picture of a single slice of pizza from my favorite pizza place in Fort Collins, Pizza Casbah. My god that looks amazing. I’m getting hungry just looking at it. This is a picture of an entire Pizza Casbah, 18-inch pizza (presumably, that means the diameter of the pizza is 18 inches): It…
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I really hope my son’s future teachers assign him lots of worksheets
/sarcasm’d Seriously though, this is my just-turned-3 year-old son and he (and thousands like him) are just a couple years away from hitting the public school system like freight trains. Are our schools ready for them? P.S. Here’s his finished masterpiece.
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Facebook and Twitter Math
It was on the Slate Culture Gabfest podcast that I heard the most appropriate, concise, and interesting description of the differences between Facebook and Twitter. It was something like this: Facebook is like a cocktail party, where everyone dresses up, puts on their best outfit, monitors their speech, are particular about who they are seen…
emergent math 