I bought and read Jo Boaler's "What's Math Got To Do With It?" last summer. She really gave me food for thought regarding grouping by ability and gender differences. I also read "Mathematical Mindsets" this fall. As a high school math teacher, I set a goal to make my teaching more visual, delve into the [...]
Cindy Johnson’s Conic Cards are the inspiration behind Polar Cards. How she took the time to create 8 decks of conic cards is beyond me, but my students loved and learned from them. In my classroom, my students first perform a Polar Graphs Investigation. This helps them explore the graphs of the polar equations they [...]
You have to love the Internet and the inspiration you get from other teachers. I put together an investigation based on the tweet below. Inspired by a session at #T3IC last year, we used lasers to find "mystery points" (foci) of parabolas based on their lines of reflection. The conversations turned to satellites, flashlights, [...]
My regular geometry students have struggled with the concept of which side measures can form a triangle. I don't know if it's the wording of theorem - the sum of any two sides of a triangle must be greater than the third - there are a lot of math words there, or if it's that [...]
In my honors precalculus classes, We performed two experiments. The first is from Math MashUp. I believe the second came from a conference I attended long ago. I had to dust off an old Word file to remember what the targets should look like and had to re-create the targets since I couldn't find the [...]
I was intrigued by Sarah Carter's Domain and Range Cards on her Math=Love blog. I was afraid I would lose a lot of time having my students cut out the cards, so I made border-less cards with functions my Pre-Calculus students will see throughout the year. Pages 1 and 2 are the framework for the [...]
After solving many, many problems that required finding a and b of an exponential equation of the form y = aebt, we needed to review the basics. I found a tarsia puzzle on the web. It didn't include all the types of problems I wanted my precalculus students to review so I found a program [...]
I remember being frustrated last year at about this time with my geometry students' performance on four questions on their circles test. The test was chronologically ordered in the way the material was presented so I was perplexed when they did poorly on the last section before review. It involved circles in the coordinate plane. Below are [...]
I remember being frightened by the polar coordinate system and graphing equations using it when I was in my students' seats many years ago. With graphing calculators, this doesn't have to be intimidating. I started the unit with an introduction to the polar coordinate system and reminded my students about how intimately familiar they are [...]
