Saving the best, or perhaps the most important, until last, MPAC 6 is the verbal part of the Rule of Four. Problems and real-life situations are “translated” from ideas or words into symbols, equations, graphs, and tables where they are examined and manipulated to find solutions. Once the solutions are found, they must be communicated…
Ants can count. I did not know that. I found this interesting fact in a book I bought recently called The Math Book by Clifford A. Pickover. The book is similar to a coffee table book in that it is nicely made with high quality paper and illustrations, although its size is about the same as…
Next year, for the first time in 15 years, I am going to be teaching high school full-time. While I have enjoyed writing and working primarily with teachers for the last 15 years, I’m looking forward to “going back to the classroom” as they say. It looks like I’ll be teaching BC calculus and Algebra…
Continuing with some thoughts on helping students read math books, we will now look at the main things we find in them in addition to definitions which we discussed previously: theorems and axioms. An implication is a sentence in the form IF (one or more things are true), THEN (something else is true). The IF part…
In helping students read and understand mathematics knowing about definitions, axioms (aka assumptions, postulates) and theorems. By this I mean knowing the parts of a definition or theorem and how they relate to each other should increase the students’ understanding. Today I’ll discuss definitions; theorems and assumptions will be discussed in a future post. A…
At this time of year many teachers are picking the calculus book for their class to use next year. At the same time, you will find teachers complaining, quite correctly, that their students don’t read their math textbooks. Authors, editors and their focus groups try their very best to make books “readable,” to no avail,…
Teaching Calculus 