[This is a back-issue of this site's newsletter]
Just a quick note….
I got an email from a teacher this week, frustrated with the easter date worksheets that I have on Dr Mike’s Math Games for Kids. They couldn’t get the worksheet to work! And they’d already presented it to the kids in their class!
You can imagine how frustrated they were! And there was no worked example on the website!
[This is a back-issue of this site's newsletter]
Although I don’t have a new game to announce this newsletter, that’s because I’ve been busy with a number of other useful things. There’s a couple of math games I have lined up for the site, but they aren’t quite ready yet. Stay tuned! In the meantime, you might like to check if Easter really is this coming weekend, with these easter date worksheets.
In an earlier post, I discussed whether math was really real, or just made up. I came to the conclusion that there’s a difference between the math that is implicit in the laws of logic, and the math that people happen to study and learn. The difference is that the latter is much much smaller than the former.
When we learn that, say, 2+2=4, is that something really true about the universe, or is it something some caveman made up? Does a cube exist as something more than just a figment of our imagination?
Here’s how my four-year-old responded when I threw him a curly math question – it’s cute!
We were trying to teach him to count backwards…
I was doing a bit of random lunch-hour web-surfing, and came across a blog post by a swimming instructor. It starts with the eye-catching line “before you can teach something, you have to realize it’s hard”
The blogger writes about their insights into how (and how not) to teach swimming, and then wonders “how much this applies to other areas (teaching math in elementary school, for example?)” Having read the post, I’d say an awful lot does. Here’s my take on it.
What shall I have on my toast?
I have four different things I can spread on my toast. If I want to taste them all, I need four slices of toast.
When I was a student in university, I felt quite strongly about this issue. I believed firmly that education should be free. After all, education is necessary for a nation to succeed. An educated populace, I believed, should be seen as a form of infrastructure – as necessary for a strong economy as good transport or telecommunications systems. Therefore, the government should pay for everyone to get educated for free, I thought.
Tim Harford is an economist who has a newspaper column called “The Undercover Economist”. He presents tongue-in-cheek answers to a wide variety of questions from readers. In his book, “Dear Undercover Economist,” some of his favorite responses have been collected together. Two that really tickled me were related to the practice of grading on a curve.
