squareCircleZ

The article Go figure – “Everyday Math” shows there’s more than one way to solve a problem, but it has parents lost in translation [which is no longer available] demonstrates two things: Mathematics education is one extended experiment Parents never have a clue what is going on in schools – especially in math In the [...]

A study by the American Institutes for Research has some scathing things to say about the state of literacy – readin’, writin’ and ’rithmetic – of US graduating college seniors. Concerning mathematics literacy, the study says: Students in 2- and 4-year colleges have the greatest difficulty with quantitative literacy: approximately 30 percent of students in [...]

Google Suggest (in beta) predicts what you are going to type into the search box. I was bemused by the following:

An article in the Dutch site, FontysOnline (the article has disappeared, unfortunately), bemoans the plans of the Dutch government to reduce the number of math hours in schools by 30%. The aim, as far as I can work out, is to allow students to choose either a social science subject (“nature, life and technique”) or [...]

Mathematical tattoos to impress your mother…

Australia Day is celebrated every 26th January, commemorating the arrival of the First Fleet in 1788. Britain’s newest colony needed some “white stock”, so the Brits sent a motley group of petty criminals half way around the world in crowded, harsh and dirty conditions. On arrival in Botany Bay and later Sydney Cove, the convicts’ [...]

GrafEq is interesting software. It is very robust when graphing relations. (A relation has more than one value of y for each value of x, eg a circle. A function, on the other hand, has only one y-value for each value of x, eg a parabola.) GrafEq is also good with functions! GrafEq (pronounced “graphic”) [...]

iTest is an American High Schools mathematics competition – delivered via the Web. You can do a practice test. Interestingly, their logo, which won some art prize, includes an earth globe, but the test is restricted to American school students only…

Finally I have found a kindred math educator. I agree with many of the issues raised by Harold Brochmann in his Questions page, especially: A lot of the mathematics processes that we force students to do are a waste of their time and ours. Who cares what the roots of a 6th degree polynomial are. [...]

Someone recently asked for a recommended method for pulling feeds from news sources into a PHP-based website. Update, 27 Feb 2007: There were some problems with the feeds from Bangladesh and the $dLimit variable. I have rewritten the tutorial where necessary. Background I use CG-Feedread by David Chait on my Interactive Mathematics site to pull [...]