I received an email from a colleague a few weeks ago, that was amazingly touching. She had been meeting with an advisee and asked the thoughtful question, “Can you think of a course or a moment that changed your academic experience in a significant way.” One would think that most high school sophomores would either […]
The other day in my Algebraic Geometry class, we were doing this problem: An airplane is flying 36,000 feet directly above Lincoln, Nebraska. A little later a plane is flying at 28,000 feet directly above Des Moines, Iowa, which is 160 miles from Lincoln. Assuming a constant rate of descent, predict how far from Des […]
This fall I was asked to do a small workshop for my department about PBL since almost everyone will be teaching a course that has some component of problem-based learning involved in it. I think for some department members it was somewhat daunting, but I had so much respect for those who were trying something […]
The school year is upon us and it is with great excitement that I look toward this new school year. I just sent off the first draft of my dissertation proposal, we just got our edited version of geometry text back from the printers, and our newly edited trigonometry text is hot off the presses […]
I just returned from a wonderful conference at Ithaca College that was the First North American Conference on GeoGebra, a wonderful Open Source Dynamic Geometry Software package that you can find online at www.geogebra.org. It has been around for a while, but it is only just getting well-known because it is free! It is also […]
I spent a wonderful week on Long Beach Island with my family relaxing and enjoying the waves. It made me think deeply about the effects of the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico and the news reports of the large balls of tar that were showing up on some beaches in Texas. So […]
What an amazing week I’ve spent in Exeter at the conference. I have met some truly wonderful people, who I feel lucky to call my colleagues in mathematics education. I’ll share some great highlights here. Monday night we heard Steven Strogatz speak – author of the Calculus of Friendship and honored professor of Applied mathematics […]
I recently saw a wonderful TED talk online by a teacher named Dan Meyer. Here is the link to the video http://www.ted.com/talks/dan_meyer_math_curriculum_makeover.html I highly recommend watching it because Dan talks about something he calls “patient problem solving” which unfortunately, he claims that today’s textbooks and curricula do not teach towards. After you watch this, I’d […]
This time of year always has me and my colleagues thinking about the way we cumulatively assess our students in the PBL courses. Since cooperation and problem solving are so important to us we are committed to having some type of collaborative experience as part of the final “exam” but we also have a committment […]