Education

Indefinite vs infinite

I have borrowed from a colleague a copy of G. A. Wentworth’s Plane and Solid Geometry, copyright 1899 and published 1902 by The Athenæum Press of Boston. I enjoy reading old textbooks because they either reinforce or give lie to certain…

Pizza Time!

The Internet is in a tizzy yet again about the evils of mathematics education. At least Common Core isn’t being demonized quite as front-and-center as in the recent past, but still. This time it’s about pizza. Which means every mathematics…

Naming Variables

First of all, let me get this out of the way: “Hey, you kids! Get off my lawn!” In this post, I comment on the notational shifts from what I was trained in back in the 1980s and what textbooks…

In this post, I’ll discuss two issues. First, I’ll look at a problem taken from a major textbook, and explain why the solution is wrong. Then, I’ll discuss why this particular problem bothers me in the greater context of mathematics…

Carole and the Common Core

Here’s another meme criticizing the Common Core: The criticism is that the student has provided a fully correct answer and gotten dinged for not providing an estimate. This is, of course, taken as yet another illustration of why Common Core…

Types of Numbers

Elementary school students spend most of their time working with counting numbers, that is, the non-negative integers. As students progress through secondary school, they work increasingly with non-integers, eventually entering the complex number plane. However, many of them maintain the…

Improper vs Mixed Fractions: A Six-Year-Old’s Perspective

I often discuss mathematics with my six-year-old son. As a teacher, my goal is to try to pinpoint where it is that student understandings go astray. As a parent, my goal is to teach my son some mathematics. We’ve discussed…

A common mistake students make when adding fractions is to add both the numerators and the denominators (I’ll use a special symbol to reinforce that this is not proper addition): $\frac{2}{5} \heartsuit \frac{3}{7} = \frac{2+3}{5+7} = \frac{5}{12}$ The general approach…

Milne: “Are” vs “Is”

I noted in an earlier post that in 1893, Milne used “are” as a casual speech reading of the equality sign, rather than the “is” that I’m used to. Adam Liss notes that “are” is also used in Danny Kaye’s…

Milne on Using “And”

At a used bookstore today, I picked up the 1893 text Elements of Arithmetic: For Primary and Intermediate Classes in Public and Private Schools by Dr. William J. Milne. One thing that I noticed was that he is adamant that “and”…

Zip and Abby

There are a lot of trite websites and apps available for teaching elementary education concepts. And then there are the occasional gems. Zip and Abby, from The Learning Chest, is one of the true gems. The goal of Zip and…

Pizza Math

This gem is timely to my thinking about ratios and units:   It seems to have situated itself broadly enough across the Internet that I don’t know if it’s real or a fabrication, but it seems plausible enough. There are,…