Several middle school math teachers have told me that there’s an important distinction between fractions and ratios that students don’t get. When I ask them what it is, the teachers can’t tell me; “it’s complicated”, they say. I’ve been troubled by that response. For me, ratios and fractions both involve division, and they certainly look…
Month: June 2015
White and Blue Elephants
First, a riddle… Q. How do you shoot a white elephant? A. With a white elephant gun. Q. How do you shoot a blue elephant? A. Paint him white, then shoot him with a white elephant gun. Back to Units In this TEDx Talk, Randy Palisoc argues that mathematics should be taught as a language. While…
Zip and Abby
There are a lot of trite websites and apps available for teaching elementary education concepts. And then there are the occasional gems. Zip and Abby, from The Learning Chest, is one of the true gems. The goal of Zip and Abby is not to teach simple “math facts” or to drill on numbers as abstract…
Pizza Math
This gem is timely to my thinking about ratios and units: It seems to have situated itself broadly enough across the Internet that I don’t know if it’s real or a fabrication, but it seems plausible enough. There are, at least, lots of non-teachers who are equally convinced that the question is a trick because,…