MrHonner

Making Math by Design — Queen’s College

I’m excited to be visiting Queen’s College on Tuesday to speak to students in QC’s TIME 2000 program. TIME 2000 prepares future teachers by having cohorts of undergraduates study math and education together. The program also puts on a great conference that shares the fun and beauty of math with high school students.

I’ve participated in the conference several times, but on Tuesday I’ll be speaking at the TIME 2000 Spring Seminar series. In Making Math by Design I’ll talk about the decisions that teachers make, and the consequences of those decisions, when we design and implement mathematical tasks for our students. I’m looking forward to doing some math together and having a good conversation about it afterward.

It’s been several years since I’ve visited Queen’s College, and I’m excited to be heading back, especially since this talk was originally scheduled for 2020 and was my first in-person talk cancelled by the pandemic! Let’s hope nothing else happens before Tuesday.

22022022

A celebration of today’s ambigrammatic date*.

*Celebration only applies for those who use the DD/MM/YYYY date format.

Resources Teaching

Pitfalls for Parents — MoMath

I’m excited to be joining Steven Strogatz this coming Monday for QED: Pitfalls for Parents, hosted by the National Museum of Mathematics.

In this event, Steve — a renowned mathematician, author, and speaker, as well as the museum’s current mathematician-in-residence — answers questions from the audience about K -12 mathematics. Steve has been inviting classroom teachers along as special guests, and I’m thrilled to be joining him on February 7th at 7 pm.

You can find out more about the event, and register, here.

By MrHonner, 5 yearsFebruary 3, 2022 ago

Resources Teaching Writing

Why Triangles are Easy and Tetrahedra are Hard — Quanta Magazine

My latest column for Quanta Magazine is a celebration of the Triangle Angle Sum theorem, a favorite result from high school geometry.

Do you think there’s a triangle whose angles measure 41, 76 and 63 degrees?
At first, answering this may seem easy. From geometry class we know that the sum of the measures of the interior angles of a triangle is 180 degrees, and since 41 + 76 + 63 = 180, the answer must be yes.
But there’s more to this question than meets the eye.

From triangles we move to tetrahedra, where a surprisingly simple question about angles wasn’t resolved until 2020. You can read all about it here.

By MrHonner, 5 yearsFebruary 2, 2022 ago

Teaching

2021 in Tweets

Here’s a tweet-per-month review of my 2021. Enjoy!

January

I couldn't help myself. https://t.co/CHbkXDrE1D pic.twitter.com/Qn7OjxLNuR
— Patrick Honner (@MrHonner) January 2, 2021

February

Today I
• Discovered I didn't actually write the lesson I thought I had last week
• Posted an assessment without adding the problems the students were supposed to do
• Posted the *solutions* instead of the problems while rectifying the error
Happy Spring Semester everyone!
— Patrick Honner (@MrHonner) February 2, 2021

March

8 yo at dinner: "Dad, how can you use Calculus to add up infinitely many numbers?" pic.twitter.com/L8qXmHTO31
— Patrick Honner (@MrHonner) March 16, 2021

April

After a little help with a proof today a student exclaimed "OHHHHHHHHH! Transitivity is so powerful." and I'm not sure I could feel more accomplished as a math teacher.
— Patrick Honner (@MrHonner) April 29, 2021

May

I once heard a teacher say they didn't want to "low level" math courses because they would get bored teaching equations of lines over and over. I think I could teach equations of lines every day.
— Patrick Honner (@MrHonner) May 26, 2021

June

A student told me one thing she's nervous about next year is not recognizing her classmates because she doesn't know how tall anyone is and I can't stop thinking about it.
— Patrick Honner (@MrHonner) June 8, 2021

July

Nine days in and 95% of my summer so far has been elliptic curves, complex numbers, and Mario Kart.
— Patrick Honner (@MrHonner) July 6, 2021

August

Sometimes understanding math is as easy as understanding that sample standard deviation isn't the sample's standard deviation.
— Patrick Honner (@MrHonner) August 11, 2021

September

A year-and-a-half since I've taught a room full of students. Hope I've still got it!
— Patrick Honner (@MrHonner) September 13, 2021

October

Today in Linear Algebra two students were trying to show a pair of vectors were linearly dependent. One said "Maybe we can twist them and do the Gaussian thing", which made me think I might have actually properly taught and contextualized row reduction for the first time ever.
— Patrick Honner (@MrHonner) October 5, 2021

November

After distributing a group test I realized I had forgotten to delete the note "ANSWER: C" from below the last question. Students solved the problem anyway because they thought I very well might have put that there intentionally to mislead them. They get me.
— Patrick Honner (@MrHonner) November 24, 2021

December

I had to arrive late to school today and was welcomed with an unintended compliment from a colleague. When he walked by my classroom before I arrived, he saw my students hard at work on the task I had prepared for them in my absence. "I had no idea you weren't here."
— Patrick Honner (@MrHonner) December 6, 2021