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Book Reading: 5 Practices for Orchestrating Productive Mathematical Discussions
Writing about the teaching books I've read is fast becoming a series, because this is the third post in a row about a teaching book I've read. The book I finished earlier this week is "5 Practices for Orchestrating Productive Mathematical Discussions" by Margaret S. Smith and Mary Kay Stein and coming out of the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics (NCTM) in the USA.
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Book Reading: Math on the Move
Over the last week or so, I have been reading the book "Math on the Move" by Malke Rosenfeld (subtitled "Engaging Students in Whole Body Learning"). Ever since connecting with Malke on Twitter back in June or July, I've wanted to read her book, and I finally just bought it and read it. Now that I've finished, it's time to write about my thoughts.
Book Reading: The Classroom Chef
Over the weekend, I read "The Classroom Chef" by John Stevens and Matt Vaudrey. This is a post about my reaction to the book.
How I choose which trig substitution to do
Trig substitution is a fancy kind of substitution used to help find the integral of a particular family of fancy functions. These fancy functions involve things like a2 + x2 or a2 - x2 or x2 - a2 , usually under root signs or inside half-powers, and the purpose of trig substitution is to use the magic of trig identities to make the roots and half-powers go away, thus making the integral easier. One particular thing the students struggle with is choosing which trig substitution to do.
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Panda Squares
This post is about a puzzle I've been tweeting about for the last couple of days. I got it originally from a book I was given back in the 1980's called "Ivan Moscovich's Super Games". In the book, Ivan calls this puzzle "Bits", but I don't think that's nearly descriptive or cute enough, so I asked my daughter what it should be called and we have come up with the much better name of PANDA SQUARES.
You can read the rest of this blog post in PDF form here.
Holding the other parts constant
It seems like ages ago – but it was only yesterday – that I wrote about differentiating functions with the variable in both the base and the power. Back there, I had learned that the derivative of a function like f(x)g(x) is the sum of the derivative when you pretend f(x) is constant and the derivative when you pretend g(x) is constant.
The Zumbo (hypothesis) Test
Here in Australia, we are at the tail end of a reality cooking competition called "Zumbo's Just Desserts". In the show, a group of hopefuls compete in challenges where they produce desserts, hosted by patissier Adriano Zumbo. There are two types of challenges. In the "Sweet Sensations" challenge, they have to create a dessert from scratch that matches a criterion such as "gravity-defying", "showcasing one colour" or "based on an Arnott's biscuit". The two lowest-scoring desserts from the Sweet Sensations challenge have to complete the second challenge, called the "Zumbo Test". In this test, Zumbo reveals a dessert he has designed and the two contestants try to recreate it. Whoever does the worst job is eliminated.
Problem strings and using the chain rule with functions defined as integrals
In Maths 1A here at the University of Adelaide, they learn that says that, given a function of x defined as the integral of an original function from a constant to x, when you differentiate it you get the original function back again. In short, differentiation undoes integration. And then they get questions on their assignments and they don't know what to do. They always say something like "I would know what to do if that was an x, but it's not just an x, so I don't know what to do".
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SQWIGLES: a guide for action and reflection in one-on-one teaching
It's university holidays again (aka "non-lecture time"), which means I'm back on the blog trying to process everything that's happened this term. Mostly this has been me spending time with students in the Drop-In Centre, since I made a commitment to do more of what I love, which is spending time with students in the Drop-In Centre. When trying to decide what to write about first, I realised that a lot of what I wanted to say wouldn't make much sense without talking about SQWIGLES first. So that's what this post is about.
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(Holding it together)
Last week, I helped quite a few students from International Financial Institutions and Markets with their annuity calculations, which involve quite detailed stuff. One of the more important problems was about how the calculator interprets what they type into it, which is really in essence about the order of operations.
