Those of us who regularly deal with entering college freshmen are all too familiar with their inadequate math preparation. But in fact, high school mathematics has been ramped up quite a bit in terms of content. What happened? An article in the American Physical Society discusses this paradox. The author of the article, Dr. Joseph Ganem, is a professor of… Read more →
An often asked question from my students is “but this is a math class – and you want me to read and write?” When teaching my upper division Intro to Proofs class, I find a certain discomfort among students in extracting information from a math text. Most students are used to skimming over some examples and finding one that matches… Read more →
I posted earlier about using Wolfram Alpha to create worksheets with conceptual understanding. One of the most central ideas in college algebra and precalculus is the connection between zero, x-intercepts and factors of a polynomial. However, it is an idea that many students have trouble grasping. So I made a short worksheet using Wolfram Alpha that engages students in studying… Read more →
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Of late, YouTube has been hosting many math videos, most of which give step by step explanations to a standard algebra or calculus problem. The Open Courseware project from MIT has posted many of their calculus lectures there as well. And it’s all free!I can pretty much type in a search term for a suitable math problem in Google and… Read more →