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Math Teacher Thanksgiving

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We are only a few short days away from our annual Thanksgiving celebration here in the United States.  I am aware that we have readers in Canada, England, Australia, and many other countries throughout the world and I know that you also have many things to be thankful for.  It goes without saying that many readers of the DigitalLesson.com blog are thankful for their God, their family, their friends, and their health among other things. 

In this post, however,  I want to take a few minutes and reflect on things that all math teachers can be thankful for.  So let’s dive right in. 

Here is my list (in no particular order) of 10 things that we, as math teachers, can all be thankful for. [Read more...]

Filed Under: Special Events, Teaching Math Tagged With: , ,

The Rewards of Repetition

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At the beginning of last school year I was in a discussion with my principal about how to raise our state standardized test scores.  I told her that I knew how to raise the scores.  It was simple, really.  As math teachers, we just needed to continuously have students practice the key math concepts covered by the all-powerful state test.  It was all a matter of repetition. 

Now I am not a big fan of teaching to the test but if my boss (the state) has determined that 7th graders are responsible to know a certain body of mathematical knowledge before they leave my classroom, then by-golly I am going to try my best to get them there.

As I shared my keen insight with the principal, she looked at me and asked if I had been talking to our math department chairmen.  I hadn’t.  It turns out that we had just decided to purchase a rather expensive daily warmup program to use with our students. 

What would this warmup program do?  [Read more...]

Filed Under: Teaching Math, Test Preparation Tagged With: , ,

Spider Man

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It was a recent cool, dark morning as I walked onto my middle school campus.  I had no idea what danger awaited me just outside the door of Room 13 as I innocently approached the classroom.  The campus was quiet, and when I am not too tired I enjoy the chance to get to campus early to work undisturbed in my room. 

My wife and two kids were still at home asleep when the incident occurred.  Just outside the base of my classroom door, suspended in mid-air, was a gigantic black widow spider.  I knew that she lived in the little hole between the student lockers and the block wall of the classroom building (I had seen her web) but I had not been to school early enough to run into her.

These little ladies can be dangerous.  I didn’t like the idea of a black widow spider so close to the students and their lockers and frankly I was tired of the widow mucking up my door with its messy webs.  I had gone so far as to stuff construction paper into the hole to try to block the spider’s access to us all.  No luck.

It was time for a showdown.  Six in the morning and dark.  No one else around.  It was either her or me.  Slowly I removed my shoe, raised it high above my head, bent at the knees like someone about to hike a football, and came down on the  intruder in a lightning flash of power.  That’s when it happened. [Read more...]

Filed Under: Math Fun, Math Stories, Teaching Math Tagged With: ,

Extra Credit Solves Everything

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Extra Credit ButtonExtra Credit.  It is the great equalizer.  It solves a multitulde of problems.  If a student receives a low score on a math quiz or test, he can just come up and ask me for extra credit and make his problem go away.  Get a D on a math test?  Go write a 10-page paper about a famous mathematician and all will be forgiven.  Memorize the first 100 digits of pi and your D will miraculously become an A.  Who cares if you still don’t understand the math?  Extra credit is the answer!

After I returned a recent test I received two emails from parents as well as several inquiries from students wondering what they could do for extra credit, in order to raise their grade.  As you can tell by my sarcastic musings above, I am not a big fan of extra credit.  Extra credit is unnecessary for students who have demonstrated their mastery of a particular set of mathematical skills.  For those who have not mastered these skills, I find it a cheap substitute for the learning which should have taken place. [Read more...]

Filed Under: Lesson and Project Downloads, Math Lessons and Projects, Teaching Math Tagged With: , , ,

Math in the Movies

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Oliver Knill, from the Department of Mathematics at Harvard University, has compiled a very interesting web page that includes video clips from 155 movies in which mathematics appears.  I enjoyed browsing this list and watching some of the clips of movies that I have seen in the past.  Many, but not all, of the movies can be watched using the full-screen options. 

Note: I believe that the video clips I have chosen to highlight below are classroom safe.  Some of the other clips on the website do include language inappropriate for the classroom.

Here are my favorite clips from movies that I am familiar with in this list: 

(Click the links below to watch each clip.)

Father of the Bride

In this hilarious clip George Banks (Steve Martin) is infuriated that hot dogs and hot dog buns are not sold in complementary packages at his local supermarket.  Dogs come in packages of 8 and buns in packages of 12.  I know that those of you with math minds out there have already calculated that George would have found contentment if he had just purchased 3 packs of hot dogs and 2 packages of buns.  Come to think of it, I think my textbook has an LCM problem like this in it! [Read more...]

Filed Under: Math Fun, Math in Real Life, Teaching Math Tagged With: , , ,
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