A reminder for all the teachers out there, just how much impact the positive phone call home can have!

I know that I’ve posted about Desmos before, but this is a particularly cool activity to get your students thinking about graph’s distinguishing features. As the teacher, you go to teacher.desmos.com and start the activity. Then the website gives you a code for your students to type into student.desmos.com. They are then randomly paired and have to find the graph that their partner chose by asking questions that narrow the options.

Desmos has different versions of this activity for lines, parabolas, rational functions and hexagons. Something to check out!

My blog was looking a little wordy lately, so here’s a cool interpretation of Sierpinski’s triangle!

Of course, there’s always more info if you do want to read more about the famous fractal.

My students asked me this week why a negative times a negative has to be positive. I told them that there is a reason, but I couldn’t produce a proof. That night I looked up this video. Then the next day I was able to reproduce the proof for them. It seems like they understood the gist of the video.

P.S. Yes, this is also the video I posted to Trisha’s tuning protocol, in case you missed it.

Please take a minute to take a look at my new page called RESOURCES. This is going to be a space for me to collect all of my favorite resources so that I won’t forget where they all live and you can enjoy them too! Comment below if any of them are new to you or you love what you find! Enjoy!

I always like to share higher level math with my students to show them things that might be cool and engage their interest. Here’s a picture of a triangle with three right angles, which of course doesn’t work in a plane, but does work if you embed it on the surface of a sphere!

I thought this was too cute not to share.

Coincidence or Not??

With many construction related issues still plaguing our new school, I have been hearing a lot of talk about teachers wanting to quit. I have to keep these reasons in mind in the next few years, as things I should guard against.

Two articles from the New York Times about data security:

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/09/technology/09aol.html

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/17/technology/17privacy.html

Here’s an important list of reminders for how to organize and check your work so as to not make stupid mistakes!

Don’t lose this article, Maia; share it with your students!

Imagine building a whole school around math. What does it look like? Does it look like this? I think this is such a cool idea. It lets students see connections between math and other areas like music and art, science and engineering. Math is at the core of how humans describe the world; why not make it the core of education?