I’m currently reading “Why Don’t Students Like School?” (second edition) by Daniel T. Willingham. While there is a lot of good stuff in this book and I’m feeling fired out about setting my educational train back on its tracks, I winced at his cheerleading for mnemonics. And then: I reframed. He suggests the use of…
Author: Clio
Diary 030924
Some random thoughts of the morning: My brain likes to keep me from writing. One strategy is to convince me that whatever I’m writing right now is keeping me from whatever it is I would rather be writing. I want to write fiction, I want to write math stuff, I want to write personal reflections,…
Birthday Thought
Birthday wishes are weird, especially with PDA and RSD. If I GET them, I feel obliged to thank people individually, which I rarely do, and then I feel guilty; that’s the PDA. If I DON’T GET them, I feel ignored and abandoned; that’s the RSD. But they’re silly, really. Why should I expect anyone else…
Green pens
When I was a tween, I used to write in green ink. At the time, there were only four colors generally available, at least from Bic, at least at the drug store that was within biking distance. Those were blue, black, red, and green. I couldn’t write in red for obvious reasons, and I didn’t…
Burnout (Diary?)
When I hear about Autistic Burnout, I feel like it should be a complete cessation of activity, and while I haven’t posted on this blog for about two months, while my overall writing activity has been WAY down, I’ve still been doing stuff. I’ve come to realize that Autistic Burnout is not, in fact, a…
F4660t
Preamble: The song quotes should not be taken as either approval or condemnation of the respective songs or their artists. I have different personal feelings about each, and in most cases, they’re complicated. “He called me f4660t when I went out for cigarettes.” – Andy Prieboy, “That Was the Voice” This week, I heard a…
Operators
Moderate level definition: An operator is a mathematical symbol takes some defined number of inputs (also called arguments) and returns an output. The first operator that students learn about is \(+\). This operator takes two values and gives their sum. For instance, \(5 + 4 = 9\). The arguments of addition are called the addends;…
FTOC (Informal)
Let \(f_0\) and \(f_1\) be two functions such that \(f_1\) represents the rate at which \(f_0\) is changing with regards to some independent variable \(t\). (If you prefer to read an example first, jump down to that section.) This relationship is typically represented by saying that \(f_1(t)\) is the derivative of \(f_0(t)\), that is: \[f_1(t)=f_0^\prime(t)\]…
An Introduction to Sets
In casual parlance, we often distinguish collections from sets: My comic book collection consists of all the comic books I own, which may include duplicates. It is not an exhaustive collection of every comic book ever produced. However, if I happen to have a set of Groo comics, that means I have every title produced…
What is Algebra, Anyway?
Ask a general person on the street to define mathematics, and they’re likely to say something about manipulating or combining numbers. Ask a mathematician to define mathematics, and they’re likely to talk more about patterns. Here, for instance, is the first sentence of the definition provided by MathWorld: “Mathematics is a broad-ranging field of study…