Author Archives: Art Duval

Inverse Functions: We’re Teaching It All Wrong!

By Frank Wilson, Chandler-Gilbert Community College; Scott Adamson, Chandler-Gilbert Community College; Trey Cox, Chandler-Gilbert Community College; and Alan O’Bryan, Arizona State University What would you do if you discovered a popular approach to teaching inverse functions negatively affected student understanding … Continue reading

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Conventional Courses are Not Enough for Future High School Teachers

By Yvonne Lai, University of Nebraska – Lincoln and Heather Howell, Educational Testing Service Consider how you would respond to two different versions of a question. In the first, you are asked to solve a high school mathematics problem. In the second, some high … Continue reading

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The Second Year of “On Teaching and Learning Mathematics”

By Art Duval, Contributing Editor, University of Texas at El Paso Another year has flown by, and so it is once again a good time to collect and reflect on all the articles we have been able to share with … Continue reading

Posted in Classroom Practices, Curriculum, Early Childhood, Education Policy, K-12 Education, Online Education, Outreach, Student Experiences, Year in Review | Tagged , , , , , , | 1 Comment

Creating a Classroom Culture

By Taylor Martin and Ken Smith, Sam Houston State University A good educator must facilitate learning for a classroom full of students with different attitudes, personalities, and backgrounds. But how? This question was the starting point for a new Faculty … Continue reading

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Wanted, Mathematicians for an Important but Difficult Task

By Art Duval, Contributing Editor, University of Texas at El Paso; Kristin Umland, Associate Professor, Department of Mathematics and Statistics, University of New Mexico (on leave), and Vice President for Content Development, Illustrative Mathematics; James J. Madden, The Patricia Hewlett … Continue reading

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Shredding My (Calculus) Confidence

By A.K. Whitney, journalist.  In 2009, Whitney went back to school to find out, once and for all, if journalists really are as bad at math as they fear they are; her blog about the experience, Mathochism, runs on Medium three days a week. … Continue reading

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Active Learning in Mathematics, Part II: Levels of Cognitive Demand

By Benjamin Braun, Editor-in-Chief, University of Kentucky; Priscilla Bremser, Contributing Editor, Middlebury College; Art Duval, Contributing Editor, University of Texas at El Paso; Elise Lockwood, Contributing Editor, Oregon State University; and Diana White, Contributing Editor, University of Colorado Denver. Editor’s … Continue reading

Posted in Active Learning in Mathematics Series 2015, Classroom Practices | Tagged , , , | 3 Comments

(Don’t?) Make ’em Laugh

By Art Duval, Contributing Editor, University of Texas at El Paso When I started teaching, I wanted to be the very best teacher.  Not just “the best teacher I could be”, but the very best teacher, the one students would tell … Continue reading

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In Math as in Dance, Don’t Miss a Step, or Else You May Fall

By A.K. Whitney, journalist.  In 2009, Whitney went back to school to find out, once and for all, if journalists really are as bad at math as they fear they are; her blog about the experience, Mathochism, runs on Medium … Continue reading

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One Reason Fractions (and Many Other Topics) Are Hard: Equivalence Relations Up and Down the Mathematics Curriculum

By Art Duval, Contributing Editor, University of Texas at El Paso  Why are fractions hard to learn for so many people?  There are many reasons for this, but I like to think about one in particular, a mathematical idea hiding in … Continue reading

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