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The question of “math and the brain” could fill entire libraries, but in this post, I’ll narrow the focus to a more practical level: what it’s like for a student’s brain to face math. The book The Now Habit, by Neil Fiore, discusses how people become overwhelmed just by thinking about the task at hand.…

On the twelfth day of Mathmas, my students sent to me: 12 Calculations Eleven Prime Numbers Ten Perfect Circles Nine Teacher Meetings Eight Algorithms Seven Students Squirming Six Angle Theorems Five Late Passes Four Calling Parents Three Square Roots Two Parabolas and some homework from last year

I love using animated gifs in the classroom. It brings a real vibrancy to the mathematical formulas that we are studying. If my complaint is that mathematics in the classroom is two-dimensional and static, then animated gifs and interactive math (plug for Euclid’s Muse) allow me to bring the motion to students in a methodical and…

I always tell my students that there are a few critical aspects of their life that they have to manage: family, friends, work (school), and politics. This is not in a particular order, and sometimes they switch priority depending on what’s going on. I think that compartmentalizing the important aspects of adult life helps focus…

I love jokes. I love comic strips, web comics, puns, jokes, and just general wit. When I was younger, I came across the book Plato and a Platypus Walk into a Bar, which fashions itself to teach philosophy through jokes. Although I have studied philosophy in many different mediums, this was one of the most…

Students generally have a serious fear of failure, which is exacerbated in the mathematics classroom. I dedicated my undergraduate research for my education degree to the alleviation of mathematics anxiety. So out of that I have a series of teaching tactics that I employ to generate more buy-in to my classes. The results of my…

An aspect of mathematics that I try to emphasize all the time is that the mathematics we teach in high school is 2-dimensional. Even with high school Calculus, although there is the aspect of motion, the graphs continue to maintain 2-dimensionality. This is especially a problem for Geometry students, who do not understand without explanation…

This year, I started to use a more visual aspect of teaching parallel line theorems. In the past, I have just given very technical location comparisons that are not intuitive and are hard to see – especially when there are ‘trick’ questions where the angles actually have no relationship. Before: Vertical angles: “angles on opposite…

Hello, world I am currently a high school math teacher at Cass Technical High School. I am teaching Geometry and IB Math Studies SL. I am going to use this blog to reflect on lessons that I have given, lessons that I would like to give, and just general thoughts. This week is the Hour…

Ah, multiplication. The quickest and most useful numerical operation we have. Where does multiplication come from? Why do most operations in high level mathematics and physics use multiplication? The famous equation, known as the “Mass-energy equivalence”: E = mc^2. That is: E = m * c * c        (with c = 299,792,458 meteres…