In some schools and communities teachers face a tremendous push for hyper-acceleration of certain students. As I mentioned in my previous post the pressure comes largely from parents, but they are often supported by students and administrators. Many parents believe that hyper-acceleration will help their child's college applications. Many students' self-image is intimately related to… Continue reading Hyper-acceleration
Author: hpicciotto
Acceleration
This is the first of a series of posts on the topic of acceleration. I have combined them and edited them into one article on my Web site. Read it there!I remember one student who managed to take my Geometry class in 9th grade even though (unbeknownst to me) she had already taken a traditional… Continue reading Acceleration
the function dance!
A friend on Google+ posted this image:<a href="data:<img alt="" border="0" src="data:I have often performed "the cubic dance" (see above!) for my students. I've also often asked them to "air graph" various functions.One complication is the fact that left and right are reversed for the person watching you, and while I try to perform things "backwards"… Continue reading the function dance!
New Practical Advice Document
Some time ago, I wrote about various techniques for extending student exposure to concepts, without allowing one's class to bog down. (See this post, and follow the links therein.) One key ingredient of this strategy is "lagging homework." The basic idea is that today's homework should not be about today's class work. It should be… Continue reading New Practical Advice Document
Pythagorean animation
Check out a GeoGebra animation I just posted: the Pythagorean theorem.It bears much discussion, as students are not likely to spontaneously make out its significance. One way to present it to a class is to first go through the whole thing on a projector, then go back through it slowly, discussing the meaning of each… Continue reading Pythagorean animation
Sum of the angles
New animation: Sum of the Angles in a Triangle. This is in the genre of "proofs without words", but of course its pedagogical power comes from students and teacher actually using words to discuss what happens.--Henri
Ripples
Math curriculum ideas expand outward from their originators, like ripples in a pond. In pre-Internet days, it was great to see teachers using photocopies of photocopies of photocopies of worksheets I created, such as "Make These Designs." Nowadays, of course, people can always download and print a fresh copy. One day at an NCTM meeting,… Continue reading Ripples
More Algebra Book Fan Mail
I have some good news for the users of the online version of Algebra: Themes, Tools, Concepts (ATTC, the textbook I co-authored with Anita Wah): all the ATTC PDFs are now searchable, and many of the files are smaller than they used to be. (See below for links.)Amanda Cangelosi, a Mathematics instructor at the University… Continue reading More Algebra Book Fan Mail
The Human Unit Circle
In 2010, I wrote a series of posts on kinesthetic activities for secondary school math. I combined all of them into one page on my Web site, which I introduced thus:One way to break up the routine in math class is to have the students get up and experience some of the concepts in their… Continue reading The Human Unit Circle
area of a parallelogram
I posted a GeoGebra animation that suggests the formula for the area of a parallelogram defined by two vectors: <img alt="" height="200" src="data: <img alt="" height="200" src="data:--Henri
Henri's Math Education Blog 