Lesson Plan Trick #2: Career Guides

At some point in teaching logarithms students tend to hit a point of despair, at which point their usual line is “why would we need this for anything?”
One of my most vocal complainers didn’t care about math at all and wanted to be a photographer.
Results of Google book search on photography and logarithms
Each field has [...]

Do Science Research By Playing a Game

Fold It: Solve Puzzles for Science
And no, it isn’t researchers studying physiology in response to playing Tetris. This is a human-aided version of the protein folding research (previously being done by computers); it’s possible humans can do things better.
This left me wondering if there was some mathematical equivalent to this — solving open problems via [...]

Lesson Plan Trick #1: Word Problems in Reality

I have discovered that word problems often contain nice activities if you let the students actually try them. Take this common one:
A tree that is 5 meters tall casts a shadow 7 meters long. At the same time of day, a building casts a shadow 20 meteres long. How tall is the building?
So, it’s certainly [...]

Exceedingly Lame Final Question

Not on my final, fortunately, but it came up in a discussion. Without seeing the question, see if you can answer it.
Find the volume of ……
A. 5 cm3
B. 10 cm3
C. 12 cm3
D. 12 cm2
(sigh)

Unit Conversion’s Fifteen Minutes of Fame

Working on plans for a summer program. Thought y’all might like this one.
…
In 1968, Andy Warhol said: In the future, everyone will be world-famous for 15 minutes.
In honor of this, Cullen Murphy coined a “warhol”, a unit of fame. For every fifteen minutes you’re famous, you get one warhol.
1. Suppose you’re famous for an hour. [...]

Open exposition problems?

Nice quote from a recently revised paper by Timothy Chow, A Beginner’s Guide to Forcing:
All mathematicians are familiar with the concept of an open research problem. I propose the less familiar concept of an open exposition problem. Solving an open exposition problem means explaining a mathematical subject in a way that renders it totally perspicuous. [...]

Missing a Test Question: A Case Study

I recently gave a test to my Geometry Concepts students which included the following:
Write a counterexample for the following: There is no number between 2 and 3.
First off, the only right answer students put was:
2.5
No 2.1, no 2 1/2, no 2.67. Only 2.5, in decimal. I don’t know if there’s a conclusion to be made [...]

Granularity of Multiple Intelligences

(This is in response to this comment, which I originally wrote as a comment, but then I realized I needed pictures. So.)
In regards to Gardner’s “multiple intelligences” theory, I’ve always found the division lines a little ad hoc and arbitrary. I have my own personal theory that multiple intelligences are to an extent valid, but [...]

Counterexamples

In retrospect, this lesson would make a good start-of-year icebreaker; it’d simultaneously check how much math vocabulary the students remember.
This is a bit customized for my own school and classroom.
…
Find a counterexample to each statement.
1. All sports have a score that starts at 0 and goes up.
2. No US state has only four letters in [...]

Venn Diagrams List Some Of My Favorite Things

Not the most original lesson, but some of my Geometry Concepts students were having trouble with Venn Diagrams.
…
music / movies / TV shows / videogames
1. Pick a category.
2. List 20 things.
3. Think of 6 properties some of these have.
Example (videogames): shooting, jumping, old, recent, 2D, 3D
Halo 3 (shooting, recent, 3D)
Super Mario Galaxy (jumping, recent, 3D)
Frogger [...]