CTK Insights

Due to a freak accident, the 28th issue of the Math teachers at play carnival went out two days before a submission deadline. With sincerest apologies I'd like to mention the submissions that arrived after the accident. John Golden, a.k.a. Math Hombre, celebrates a full circle day (6/28) with an article on Similarity and π. [...]

The NCTM holds to his promise to post interesting Problems to Ponder in the NCTM's newsletter. Here's one from the July 15 issue. In the figure below, quadrilateral ABCD is a square, and E is the midpoint of the side AD. How do the areas of regions I, II, III, and IV compare? Another way [...]

In an early June issue of the NCTM newletter, President Mike Shaughnessy offered a Problem to Ponder: Scenario: Students at your school have just finished competing in the qualifying round of a nationally sponsored contest on mathematical reasoning and sense making. When the work was scored, it turned out that four students at your school [...]

The fact that π exists is due to the similarity of all circles. The ratio of the circumference to the diameter would not be constant otherwise. The simple idea of similarity is commonly being reported as overly hard on children. I am confident that the problem must lie with the manner of presentation and not [...]

This is a Math teachers at play carnival, issue # which I am going to reveal shortly. See if you can make it from what is known as a single image stereogram. Try focusing your eyes behind the screen. In this month issue: What is the number of this issue? Sad news Interesting and relevant [...]

V. Arnold in an article Innumeracy and the Fires of the Inquisition narrates the following episode: A flier that was distributed during a forum (the paper has been written in 1998) of the mathematical section of RAS (Russian Academy of Sciences) contained a QA section. The answer given to the question of how much is [...]

I think this is the first time in a long while that I read education news both without resentment or disbelief. Detroit Public Schools is set to open its first school without a principal -- teachers will be running the day-to-day operations and making all pertinent decisions. (Peggy Walsh-Sarnecki, Detroit Public Schools tries something new: [...]

Professor Kim Sun-woong from the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee has published in The Korea Times, Friday, July 2, 2010, an article, Koreans' education zeal unparalleled globally. The article opens with a well deserved panegyric: Korea is one of the most highly educated nations in the world. As of 2010, the enrollment in primary schools [...]

One of my favorite examples of simple mathematics that seems to benefit from the tools that only appeared at the end of the last century is the problem of breaking chocolate bars. Given a rectangular chocolate bar that consists of a number of small squares. The task is to break it up along the "fault" [...]

I just received an email from an Israeli friend who forwarded me an email from a friend of his with the subject line "It works, too." The original email was about determining one's age, given the number of times one feels an urge to enjoy chocolate over any particular week. The recipe assume that the [...]