This is a “what-if” document. It’s not intended as a serious suggestion for how we should write mathematical notation or for replacing current notation, but rather an exploration of how things might work if mathematical notation had developed in a different way. Do I want to develop this further? I don’t know yet. But this…
Month: October 2021
Protected: I Sing Last, Not For Tears
There is no excerpt because this is a protected post.
In (Partial) Defense of Butterflies
Teaching students how to add fractions can be a real struggle. A big part of this is that we tend to get conceptually complicated about what fractions are. And a big part of this is because fractions can be conceptually complicated. I teach Algebra II. (For an elementary teachers reading this, though, hold on: I’m not…
Options, not Preferences
This morning I saw a tweet that implied that cis people who use “(he/they)” or “(she/they)” in their email signatures but who present in a way that matches their gender are being opportunistic. One reply referred to it as virtue signaling, and another mocked someone who said their pronoun is “she” but that neutral pronouns…
On the bread and circuses of “Squid Game”
So, last week, we watched Squid Game. Spoiler alert: Non-specific reference to the ending below. Let me get this out of the way: The program was very well written. I didn’t really find the themes particularly original. The very idea of “bread and circuses” goes back thousands of years, and a glossy production (estimated budget…