For the Love of Mathematics
We introduce the Into Math Graph tool, which students use to graph how “into" mathematics they are over time. Using this tool can help teachers foster conversations with students and design experiences that focus on engagement from the student’s perspective.
An escape room can be a great way for students to apply and practice mathematics they have learned. This article describes the development and implementation of a mathematical escape room with important principles to incorporate in escape rooms to help students persevere in problem solving.
Transferring fundamental concepts across contexts is difficult, even when deep similarities exist. This article leverages Desmos-enhanced visualizations to unify conceptual understanding of the behavior of sinusoidal function graphs through envelope curve analogies across Cartesian and polar coordinate systems.
This article explores three processes involved in attending to evidence of students' thinking, one of the Mathematics Teaching Practices in Principles to Actions: Ensuring Mathematical Success for All. These processes, explored during an activity on proportional relationships, are discussed in this article, another installment in the series.
Explore what it means to balance love for mathematics with love for students.
Capturing students' own observations before solving a problem propelled a culture of sense making by meeting needs typical of middle school learners.
One of the many benefits of teaching mathematics is having the opportunity to encounter unexpected mathematical connections while planning lessons or exploring ideas with students and colleagues. Consider the two problems in figure 1.
Specific teacher moves and lesson planning can facilitate student empowerment in the middle school classroom.
To introduce sinusoidal functions, I use an animation of a Ferris wheel rotating for 60 seconds, with one seat labeled You (see fig. 1). Students draw a graph of their height above ground as a function of time with appropriate units and scales on both axes. Next a volunteer shares his or her graph. I then ask someone to share a different graph. I choose one student with a curved graph (see fig. 2a) and another with a piece-wise linear (sawtooth) graph (see fig. 2b).