Tag: math
-
My semester with Desmos Activity Builder
This semester I taught College Algebra and Developmental Math at a community college. Being new to the institution, I mostly hewed to the standards and progressions and textbooks from prior iterations of the course taught by more tenured faculty. However, I did make one significant change: the graphing calculator. While previous iterations of the course…
-
What’s so great about self-checking exercises?
My students really appreciated self-checking exercises this semester iin College Algebra. This post offers some benefits and examples of self-checking exercises using Desmos’ Activity Builder feature.
-
Three Strategies to Help Improve Students’ Conception of Math – Part 2: Do Useful Math
In my previous post, I discussed one way to provide tasks that help students reimagine the discipline of mathematics: doing creative math. This post discusses the second of three strategies: doing useful math. To me, the interesting thing about math is that it is at once a plaything with seemingly no utility and an immensely…
-
Three Strategies to Help Improve Students’ Conception of Math – Part 1: Do Creative Math
How can we offer students a truer and more open conception of mathematics? Part 1: Do creative math.
-
Delightful Data Visualization: Polypad and Young Statisticians
We all acknowledge that data analysis and representation is a key part of our math curricula in the 21st century. But while it’s baked into Common Core and other state standards, it can be a bit unwieldy at lower grades. One of the barriers between students and sophisticated data analysis has been (until recently) lack…
-
Academic Safety for Pre-Service Teachers and Other Reflections from the Semester
This has been a unique semester in that I took two courses and taught a course. The course I taught is a one-hour seminar course, “Math for Elementary Teachers,” not to be confused with their “actual” math course, nor their math teaching methods course. This course is a small part of pre-service teachers’ (PSTs) teacher…
-
Musings on Mathematical Creativity
This semester I had to write a literature review of a topic of our choice. Last year I focused on assessment, which will be my dissertation topic. I wanted to try something a little more “lighthearted” this year, so I went with Mathematical Creativity. I’m not going to reproduce my paper here, but I did…
-
Part 6: Scoring with Humility
This is the sixth and final installment of a mini-series on rubric design and use. Be sure to check out the other posts as well as the initial post. Your grades are qualitative data, not quantitative data. Whether you’re using a rubric on a complex task, or assigning a number out of 100 from a…
-
Part 5: Teaching with a rubric and teaching the rubric
This is Part 5 of a mini-series on rubrics. Be sure to check out the other parts as well as the intro post. Now we can have some fun. Creating a rubric is indeed hard work. Common indicators help streamline the process, but it still takes time to create and score them. But now that…
emergent math 