First let me assure all the educators out there that these lesson plans are not designed to add more work to an already over worked teacher hectic day. Quite the contrary; I’ve been teaching long enough to hate those pie-in-the -sky ideas that sound so very grand, but in reality are just an enormous amount ...
Integers are the whole numbers and their opposites (…-2, -1, 0, 1, 2…). Students, particularly in middle school, will be learning to subtract these positive and negative numbers. As a long time middle school math teacher, I know that this math lesson isn’t easy for these kids. I believe, however, that when a little rhyme, ...
Math, to hear most people talk about it, particularly most students, is boring, irrelevant, difficult, pointless and just a great big waste of time. Maybe they’re right. When’s the last time you divided fractions? Or solved a quadratic equation? No, they aren’t right. And if you want to know why I don’t think they’re right, ...
Settled on the border of Nepal and Tibet in China is Mount Everest, also known as Chomolungma, which means “Goddess Mother of the World” in Tibetan and Sagarmatha in Sanskrit, which means “Ocean Mother” is a 1500 mile long mountain range. The range was formed over 70 million years ago in the area that is ...
Most people find themselves wishing they lived somewhere warmer when the winter months come around. Some have a good reason to wish for warmer weather, but others have it better than they know. While some people can’t even image living somewhere where the temperatures are in the single digits during the winter months, others wouldn’t ...
In a first year algebra class, students will encounter problems involving simplifying square roots. But many times the teacher simply doesn’t explain the process by which this is accomplished in a manner that students can understand. I will explain a way that will make simplifying square roots easier for students of any ability level. The ...
Just as imaginary numbers are complex number, there beginnings are also complex. Although Italian Renaissance mathematician Gerolamo Cardano is credited with the first acknowledgement of the existence of imaginary numbers in his book Ars Magna published in 1545, the topic is somewhat controversial. Niccolo Fontana Tartaglia communicated some of the information in Cardano’s book which ...
