It’s Been a While…Geometry

Today while teaching Geometry, I remembered why I was so intimidated by it when I taught it years ago – I hate all the writing involved with theorems, proofs, and postulates. However, now that I have a Mimio and visual projector in my classroom, I’m ready for another shot. After a quick search, I learned that the book has online resources, but no power points. After searching some more, I came across a power point presentation for each of the 12 chapters of the book. All I have to say, is thank you Robert Fant for publishing your work. By not having to spend hours of planning period time working out each chapter, you are saving me lots of time and trouble.

YouTube Tuesday: Top 10 Mathematical Mistakes

While trying to find some fun stuff to do with my classes, I came across the textbook, “The Heart of Mathematics: An Invitation to Effective Thinking”, by Edward B. Burger and Michael Starbird. So I got to wondering, does Burger have any videos posted on YouTube? When I searched his name, I discovered that he has tons of videos posted that are similar to those on Kahn Academy, but then I came across one that was a bit different. I thought that this video was a great example of many of the mistakes that I see in my classes.

Because I would like to incorporate these videos into my classroom and have the students’ benefit from their content, I have also made a worksheet that the students will be able to do, with a little assistance. Since the video that Burger posted was intended for college Algebra, and since I only teach high school Algebra, I decided that #9 had to be reworked so that the students would get more out of it. So instead of looking at logarithms, which we don’t usually talk about until the end of their Algebra 2 course, I decided to include “Simplifying Fractions” into this space, since this is a common mistake that I tend to see in my classes.

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