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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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."
It’s been great to be back. It’s also been an interesting challenge trying to weave together what I learned over the past year-and-a-half as a full-time remote teacher with what I was doing in-person before that. Add in new colleagues, redefined priorities for teacher teams, and a brand new course to teach and it’s been a pleasantly busy return to the building.
Without question my single biggest professional project this year, writing or otherwise, was getting a manuscript submitted. I knew it would be more work than I expected, and it was. But the process was exciting and eye-opening and worthwhile, and I am thrilled that Barron’s Painless Statistics will be out in June 2022.
It’s been another year full of challenges, changes, and opportunities, and I hope 2022 brings us a healthier balance of all those things.
