Write This Down Now
I am able to communicate with you right now because of one of the oldest and greatest inventions of humanity: Writing. Prior to writing, humans had to keep thei...
Month: June 2017
Pascal, Pacioli, Probability, and Problem-Based Learning
I’m currently reading Howard Eves’s Great Moments in Mathematics After 1650 (1983, Mathematical Association of America), a chronological collection ...
The Fourth Dimension (Thoughts)
I’ve had two recent thoughts about the fourth dimension. The first relates to Euler’s Formula, which says that the difference between the sum of the...
Moment
I used to go by a different name. It’s been so long that I’d nearly forgotten. The other day, I was out somewhere when someone said the name. I turn...
Being a Son, Being a Father
As I write this, it’s Father’s Day. I wish a Happy Father’s Day to every decent person who identifies as a father figure in somebody’s life, be it as a parent, ...
Geometry for multiplication, division, and roots
Contemporary plane geometry of the sort taught in the standard American high school is most heavily informed by two books and a third mathematician. The first o...
Factoring and long division
This morning, I’ve been watching YouTube videos. I started with Tarleen Kaur’s video on Middle Term Splitting. What I find interesting about Kaur...
Positive numbers and absolute value
They say that when you’re a hammer, everything looks like a nail. Since I’m currently thinking about conceptual vs procedural teaching, I’m no...
The smallest angle
I have been thinking about procedural vs conceptual thinking, which Skemp’s seminal article refers to as relational vs instructional. One of the questions...
Bill Maher: Typical White Male Liberal
On Friday’s episode of Real Time, Bill Maher provided a clinic on some of the worst white male verbal behaviors, and in how not to take full responsibility. In ...