Category Archives: Math Education

Michael Pershan’s Problem Problems

I have enjoyed math teacher Michael Pershan’s work for a long time. I follow him on Twitter, and I wrote about his website Math Mistakes a few years ago because, darn it, mistakes are interesting! A couple years ago, he … Continue reading

Posted in K-12 Mathematics, Math Education | 1 Comment

Some Stories of Journals Behaving Badly

Hoax papers have a long and time-honored history. Ten years ago a group of students from MIT wrote a program that randomly generated totally nonsensical computer science papers. One of their bogus papers was accepted by a conference and it … Continue reading

Posted in Issues in Higher Education, Publishing in Math, Uncategorized | Tagged , , | 1 Comment

Back-to-School Blogs, 2017 Edition

Today, I’m taking my chances with traffic and driving up to Idaho to try to get in the path of eclipse totality. (Fun fact: according to my back-of-the-envelope calculations, if everyone in the country went to the path of totality, … Continue reading

Posted in Issues in Higher Education, K-12 Mathematics, Math Education | Comments Off on Back-to-School Blogs, 2017 Edition

Teaching Math to Incarcerated Students

Last month, Beth Malmskog wrote a post for the AMS blog PhD Plus Epsilon about teaching mathematics at a nearby prison. Malmskog is a math professor at Villanova, and in the post she writes about a course she and her … Continue reading

Posted in Issues in Higher Education, Math Education | Tagged | 1 Comment

What Are You Going to Do with That?

For people in graduate school for math, the question, “What are you going to do with that?” often seems to have a clear, easy answer: “I’m going to be a math professor.” In grad school, our role models are the professors … Continue reading

Posted in Data Science, Math Education | Tagged , , , | 5 Comments

Diversify Your Blogfolio

It’s March. As the sun sets on black history month and rises on women’s history month, I feel inclined, as I do every March, to draw attention to some of the great women who blog about math as well as … Continue reading

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A Circular Approach To Linear Algebra

This semester I’m teaching Linear Algebra for the first time, so naturally, I am constantly on the prowl for all of the linear algebra resources the internet has to offer. To begin with, I’m using a free online textbook called … Continue reading

Posted in Math Education | Tagged , , , | 4 Comments

The Pseudocontext 2016 Deserves

2016 has been the year of the lolsob. I have my reasons for feeling that way, and I’m guessing you might too. In that light, I’ve especially started looking forward to Dan Meyer’s “pseudocontext Saturday” posts. In each one, he finds a picture … Continue reading

Posted in K-12 Mathematics, Math Education | Tagged , , , , , | 1 Comment

As The Dust Settles, Let’s Check The Numbers

I really didn’t want to write about the election. But probably, much like you, it’s all I can think about right now. News media is completely saturated with it and the blogs are churning out a steady stream of predictions … Continue reading

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Which One Doesn’t Belong?

1, 2, 4,…. What’s the next number in the sequence? I was a rule-follower as a kid, so I always got the “right” answer on questions like that, but they still bugged me. Sure, 8 would be predictable, but why … Continue reading

Posted in K-12 Mathematics, Math Education | Tagged , | 2 Comments