When I went to public school, the basic dress code for students was: Don’t cause trouble. We had what was ostensibly called “free dress,” but students did occasionally get sent home. The only one I remember involved a t-shirt with a cuss word on it. It was tacitly understood: Cover your basic bits. This is…
Author: Clio
sometimes
sometimes i feel like tearing my chest wiiiiiide open because that way you could see my soul gasping in the great expanse sometimes i feel like staring into the sun and speaking out in the tongue in which it speaks to me sometimes i want to scream until i cough up blood and phlegm so…
Keeping an Eye out for Ableism
I have a prosthetic eye. I have had it since I was about a year old, before I could speak. I don’t know what life would be like without it. More importantly, I don’t know what my life would be like with two functioning eyes. According to my interpretation of the Americans with Disabilities Act,…
Number values and multiple representations
One of the questions my mind keeps returning to is: What is a number? I don’t mean this in a high-level set theory way. I’m not talking about aleph-numbers or other sorts of concepts. I’m restricting my thoughts here to the sort of numbers that are the domain of high school mathematics, nothing trickier than…
Speaking English vs Speaking Math
One of the challenges that I see with students learning mathematics is their confusion with what qualifies as the content of mathematics and the language of mathematics. In a famous and enduring article, “Relational Understanding and Instrumental Understanding”, Richard Skemp pointed out that teaching concepts instead of procedures will be difficult if students think that…
Enough is Enough: The Hoarding of the Ultrarich
Many years ago, I saw a documentary on a tribe somewhere in the third world. This tribe’s diet relied heavily on taro roots, a vegetable similar to a potato. After the harvest, the tribal elder, an old man, would take the largest roots and put them in storage. Supposedly, this was in case there was…
Fat Jokes about People We Dislike are Still Fat Jokes
Last weekend, New Jersey Governor Chris Christie had a Marie Antoinette moment: Having closed the state’s beaches to the general population, he and his family relaxed on the sand. Aerial photographs caught him in the act, and illogical explanations followed. What also followed? “Beached whale” jokes. Chris Christie is undeniably obese. He has long struggled…
Three and a half methods for finding square roots
The easiest way to find a square root in this technological age is to use a calculator. That’s a fine method if what you want to do is simply calculate a square root. However, if what you want to do is understand what a square root is, here are some methods for finding the value…
Why We’re all Fragile Snowflakes
I’m a fragile snowflake. So are you. I don’t mean this ironically, and I don’t mean it in the same sense as “We’re all racist.” I mean that, in the eyes of someone else, someone who doesn’t know you, you’re too sensitive about something. So am I. Most of my friends and social media contacts…
De Gua and the Pythagoreans
The Pythagorean Theorem states that, given a right triangle, the areas of squares placed along the two legs will have the same area as a square placed on the hypotenuse. This is normally written as \(a^2 + b^2 = c^2\), where \(a\) and \(b\) are the leg lengths and \(c\) is the hypotenuse length. De…