Cognitive Dissonance: Why Political Discussions Turn Nasty
If you’re like me, your social media has been populated lately with commentary using emotional appeals to get people to change their vote for President, with a ...
Month: August 2016
Multiplying Negative Numbers
Students often struggle with the concept of multiplying negative numbers, particularly with the notion that multiplying two negative numbers results in a positi...
Dismantling the Manhood Myth: Why It’s Damaging to Define Men in Terms of Size
When Donald Trump responded to Marco Rubio’s comment about his small hands being no indication of a problem elsewhere on his body, he invoked one of the most vu...
The Privilege of Not Discussing Privilege: How the Hypersensitive Invoke an Oppressive Past to Justify Themselves
It’s a common experience: We try to talk about privilege or Black Lives Matter or institutional racism, and we find ourselves walking on eggshells, carefully ch...
The Game of Set
The game of Set consists of 81 cards. Each card has one, two, or three identical symbols of one of three shapes (oval, diamond, or squiggle), in one of three co...
Units: “How many days…”
This is an example of a common sort of story problem encountered in standardized tests: “1. A team of five professionals can do a certain job in nineteen ...
Losing the Sense of Decency
George Santayana famously said, “Those who do not learn history are doomed to repeat it.” Recent political events have stirred up the most famous altercation fr...
The Free Throws Problem Part 2
Here’s an extension to the problem in my previous post. Time has run out, and a player is at the free throw line. If he makes the first shot, he gets a se...
Beyond ‘It Was Just a Joke’: Denial of the Obvious as a Distraction Technique
During the 2016 Republican National Convention, Scott Baio sat down with MSNBC’s Tamron Hall to discuss a tweet he’d made about Hillary Clinton. The tweet conta...
The Free Throws Problem
At a recent workshop on collaboration, the other participants and I were presented with a version of this problem: Adam hits 60% of his free throws. He gets fou...