This post is a little personal venting along with some serious math. I am in an Algebra 2 training today, and the instructor is doing some long division for finding slant asymptotes. Okay, nothing wrong with that, but I ask why we aren’t using synthetic division when we just finished using synthetic division in the [...]
I am going to summarize the conclusions and hiccups my learners had in their AP Statistics projects. One thing that I took away from this process this year was next year I the learners want to be more involved in the project requirements earlier in the year. I need to leverage the technology they will [...]
Yea, that’s right. I just had 2 classes in a row teach themselves and others how to complete the square with circles and ellipses. How did I accomplish this miracle, because I really do consider it to be a miracle. In my Advanced Algebra Class we have the following problem called, creatively enough, The [...]
One short lesson that came from the Exeter sessions was how they teach lines and what formats they use to teach writing equations of lines. It is amazing how often we, as math teachers, fail to build connections between different elements of mathematics simply because we feel like we have to hold to some form [...]
Okay, all along I was promising a massive file upload for all the readers who want the Exeter materials. I will explain what each group of files are for as I go. All files are in WORD or PDF format, and all are in a zipped folder. Downloading and unzipping the folders will speed up [...]
In this post I want to show Exeter’s problem solving strategy. This is important, because it is SO different from how a problem like this is typically approached. First off, the problem I am going to model is M1:21:11 [Math 1, page 21, problem 11] 11. Alex was hired to unpack and clean 576 very [...]
Before I begin going through this problem I have selected, I want to link you to where the PDF’s of the documents can be found. Notice these are NOT the problem sets, these are activities that ARE used in class, but also are pulled together for teacher use at the Phillips Exeter Academy Summer Math [...]
Before I get into some examples of what we did for the 4 days of Exeter training, I want to discuss what the overall philosophy of pedagogy that was modeled exhaustively. Never once did the instructor actually SAY, “This is how we designed and planned the problems.” Instead, he set up the situation where we [...]
Many people ask me why I ride my motorcycle long distances in the summer. This summer I traveled from Reno, NV to St. Louis, MO. It was around 4000 miles, round trip, and brutally hot for a couple of states worth of riding. But, that traveling allows me one single thing I rarely get. Time [...]
I tried something very new in AP Stats this year. Okay, it may not be all that new, but it was new for me. Last year when teaching confidence intervals, I taught it as it shows in the book, first 1 prop z, then 2 prop z, then inference testing, then 1 sample t, then [...]