The Math Education Blog
Metamorphosis is a New York-based company that offers professional content coaching to transform the mindset and practice of both teachers and administrators. I recently had the pleasure to collaborate with Metamorphosis staff members Toni Cameron and Kara Levin as well as mathematics coach Ariel Dlugasch from P.S. 276 in a coaching learning community that brought...
News alert! Scott and I wrote the cover story, Connecting Functions in Geometry and Algebra, in this month’s Mathematics Teacher. You can read the article in print, but better yet, go to the free online version. This is the first time Mathematics Teacher has incorporated live dynamic-mathematics figures into its online offerings, allowing readers to manipulate the mathematical objects in...
The power of a point theorem is one of the more surprising results in elementary geometry. The theorem says that if two chords AB and CD of a circle intersect at point P, then the product AP · PB is equal to the product CP · PD. You can see an illustration of this theorem in the Web Sketchpad model below. Drag points...
Can mathematical curves be beautiful? Most certainly! Precalculus students glimpse the connection between mathematics and art when they graph roses, cardioids, limaçons, and lemniscates. But these curves give just a taste of the beauty that can be achieved when graphing equations. In a recent article from the online science magazine Quanta, Pradeep Mutalik reviews a gorgeous new math book, Creating Symmetry:...
Mirek Majewski was born in Poland and studied mathematics at the Nicholas Copernicus University in Poland with an M.S. and Ph.D. in non-classical geometries. He is a professor of mathematics and computer science at several universities – PNG University of Technology, Inter-University of Macau (now Saint Joseph University), Zayed University in United Arab Emirates, and New York Institute of Technology....
Did you know that aside from being a source of news, The New York Times is also the place to get your weekly fix of mathematics? Their online Numberplay column features some very clever math puzzles. Last year, in fact, our blog featured a Numberplay puzzle about a flying squirrel-frog from former Key Curriculum editor, Dan...
In my prior post, I presented a “zooming” number line model that allowed students to estimate the location of a point along a number line and then repeatedly magnify that portion of the number line to obtain ever-finer estimates, accurate to tenths, hundredths, thousandths, and beyond. In a sense I got ahead of myself because I...
With Web Sketchpad, it’s easy to craft tools that are tailor made for the task at hand. I was reminded of this flexibility several weeks ago when creating an interactive model for the elementary curriculum Everyday Mathematics. My goal was to design a lesson focusing on the triangle area formula, A = bh/2. In particular,...
The origins of this week’s Web Sketchpad model date back to the Connected Geometry curriculum from the mid 1990s. I was one of the co-authors of the curriculum, working at Education Development Center with a wonderful team of math educators (Al Cuoco, Paul Goldenberg, and June Mark, among others) to develop a habits of mind approach...
This Thursday, Scott Steketee and I will be presenting two sessions at the NCTM 2015 Annual Meting in Boston: Functions as Dances: Experience Variation and Relative Rate of Change Session 52 on Thursday, April 16, 2015: 8:00 AM-9:15 AM in 157 B/C (BCEC) How better to explore rate of change than as independent and dependent...