Here are some examples of 3D surfaces sculpted out of floral foam by a Calculus student.
Creative and beautiful! More examples can be seen on my Facebook page.
NYT Resources Sports Teaching
Math Lesson: Fantasy Football
My latest contribution to the New York Times Learning Network is a Math Lesson designed around a simple Fantasy Football-style game.
In this lesson, students use data, statistics, and a novel matchup metric to evaluate players and choose their teams.
As the results come in every week, students can refine their strategies and try to make more accurate projections!
Appreciation Teaching
Fun with the PSAT
My students were recently making fun of some of the math problems on the PSAT. Apparently, one of the questions went something like this:
After having a bit of a laugh about it, we decided to try to help the PSAT exam writers make a more interesting question. Here is our revision:
Creating this new question was far more interesting than solving the original! And thanks to Wolfram|Alpha, we can easily check the answer.
Challenge Resources
Polygonal Oddities
This is a crazy collection and categorization of mathematical oddities.
http://www.recmath.org/PolyCur/p6odd/index.html
Here, the word oddity has a specific, technical mathematical meaning: an oddity is a figure with at least one line of symmetry that is made up of an odd number of copies of some polygon.
I’ve never heard of oddities before, and I learned a lot of new vocabulary words while exploring this page: polyform, hexapent, and quinquerotary, to name a few!
Challenge NYT
Math Quiz: NYT Learning Network
Through Math for America, I am part of an on-going collaboration with the New York Times Learning Network. My latest contribution, a Test Yourself quiz-question, can be found here:
https://learning.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/10/24/test-yourself-math-oct-24-2011/
This problem is based on a recent discovery of sunken treasure at the bottom of the sea and asks “How much is silver worth per pound?”