Mathematics Educators Weekly Newsletter - Thursday, April 28, 2016

Mathematics Educators newsletter

Top new questions this week: Breaking students from the habit of relying on examples One of the most frustrating things about my experiences teaching math (at the university level, if that matters) is that students seem very reluctant to actually learn the material. Instead, they seem ... undergraduate-education examples   asked by anomaly 16 votes answered by paul garrett 6 votes How do I nicely tell my coworkers that they are NOT mathematicians? I teach for a company along with a large group of teachers, almost all of which are people who have graduated with the standard Bachelor level education in Education and Science/Mathematics. I am ... secondary-education   asked by Trogdor 13 votes answered by Dirk 28 votes How to help student get to grips with exercises, definitions, theorems? This question is an attempt at implementing my suggestion that the second paragraph of that question could be turned into an important question. The discussion starting in comments there would be more ... undergraduate-education   asked by Benoît Kloeckner 8 votes answered by Daniel R. Collins 7 votes Summary of the mechanism of reification The concept of "reification" in mathematics education is interesting. Roughly, if I understand this correctly, one "reifies" processes into mathematical objects. Very recently, it occurred to me that ... mathematical-pedagogy psychology   asked by Jon Bannon 6 votes Communicating to students the meaning of extremely large numbers I'm planning on showing my students a "deep zoom" video of the Mandelbrot set. The video is about 15 minutes long and, at the end, shows an image that is zoomed by a factor of $10^{220}$. I'd like ... magnitude scientific-notation large-numbers   asked by mweiss 4 votes answered by Chris C 5 votes Teaching new math at home I'm a homeschool mom, my daughter is 7. She will be in second grade next year. I appreciate the different ways of doing math, rather than just stacking the numbers and adding/subtracting. I'm not sure ... primary-education common-core   asked by Shannon 4 votes answered by Jasper 0 votes Determinant applications for 16 year olds I am teaching matrices, determinants and systems to a class of 16-year-olds. As you can expect, they do not know calculus or linear algebra. What they do know is a little bit of matrices (how to ... secondary-education linear-algebra   asked by Lafayette Sposito 1 vote answered by Joseph O'Rourke 0 votes Greatest hits from previous weeks: What are the comparative advantages of open-book versus closed-book exams? I would like to know the advantages and disadvantages of open-book exams as compared to closed-book exams, particularly in standard undergraduate courses like calculus or linear algebra. My practice ... reference-request exams   asked by JDH 25 votes answered by Sue VanHattum 20 votes How can I teach my students the difference between a sequence and a series? Sequences and series are related concepts but differ extremely from one another. I feel that students in integral calculus frequently mix them up. Part of the problem is that: Sequences are usually ... calculus students-mistakes series sequences   asked by Brian Rushton 24 votes answered by brendansullivan07 29 votes Can you answer this? Cognitively Guided Instruction (CGI) for 5th Grade Are there any schools out there successfully using CGI with a 5th grade curriculum? Our students have poor number sense, and we'd like to remediate using CGI. I'd love to compare sequences of lessons ... course-design primary-education course-sequence   asked by Sam23 1 vote

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