Resources

As part of our conversation in the February 2014 issue of Math Horizons, Steven Strogatz shared his thoughts on the current state of math education in the Aftermath section of the magazine.

Here’s the beginning of his “I have a dream” speech about math teaching.

In my dream world, everyone would have the chance to be a teacher the way Mr. Joffray [Strogatz’s high school calculus teacher and the subject of his book The Calculus of Friendship] was a teacher.

His job was to teach us calculus, but he had his own vision of how to teach it and he followed that vision. He was creative, and he put his personal stamp on the course for us. He trusted his judgment, and the school trusted him. He could teach us the way he wanted to teach us, and he was a great teacher.

Math Horizons makes Aftermath freely available online, so you can read the entire segment here.

At the 2013 TIME 2000 conference, I ran a workshop on mathematical folding called Fun With One Cut!  Here are a few of the introductory slides.

In the workshop, students explored some basic properties of plane geometry through folding and tried their hands at the infamous fold-and-cut challenge:  given a plane figure drawn on  a piece of paper, is it possible to fold the piece of paper in such a way that the figure can be removed from the paper with a single, straight cut?

This is a fun, hands-on mathematical activity, and is connected to some surprisingly deep and rich results in both geometry and mathematical origami.

You can download the set of templates I used for this workshop here, and you can find more of my mathematical folding resources here.