Through Math for America, I am part of an ongoing collaboration with the New York Times Learning Network. My latest contribution, a Test Yourself quiz-question, can be found here:
Test Yourself Math — January 30, 2013
This question has to do with the surge in college and junior college graduates in China. How far behind the US is China in graduations per capita?
As part of Math for America‘s inaugural Master Teachers on Teaching symposium, I gave a talk titled “g = 4, and Other Lies the Test Told Me”. Video of the talk can be seen here.
The theme of the symposium was modeling, and my talk focused on the ways that standardized testing can undermine the teaching and learning of modeling.
By looking at a series of poorly-conceived state exam questions, I discussed the ramifications that these questions have on student’s conceptions of mathematics and modeling, and on the teaching that goes on in the classroom.
This hypotrochoid art set was the perfect stocking stuffer for a math lover like myself! With a little practice you can quickly produce some really beautiful images.
This is a sample of the problems from the book “200 Puzzling Physics Problems” published by Cambridge University Press:
http://catdir.loc.gov/catdir/sam ples/cam034/00053005.pdf
This above resource contains 89 of the problems, but no solutions.
The problems here are simple to state, but seem to get at profound mathematical and physical ideas. For example, if the Earth and Sun were scaled down as to be 1 meter apart on average, how long would a year be?
I can see a lot of productive student struggle coming from this book!
This was a surprising exhibit at the Liberty Science Center in Jersey City, New Jersey: a fairly simple pulley-system makes this large spherical net expand and collapse.
It definitely caught me off guard the first time! Here’s a lovely video of the sphere in action.