CTK Insights

Probably every math teacher has the experience of facing such questions; most likely the students who asked them were not looking for the answers as arguments to study mathematics, but rather in support of their conviction that the effort is not necessary. Most of the answers teachers give perfectly serve this purpose. I wrote about [...]

For Day 4 of the break, I shall present 4 games that may at first appear rather unrelated; this is the purpose of the activity to discover the commonality between the four. All four are two-players games, with the players moving in turns. The Fish Soup game For the game you should prepare 9 cards [...]

An interesting problems has been offered at the 1993-1994 Saint Petersburg Regional Mathematical Olympiad, grade 9. Ten chips are placed on the main diagonal of a 10×10 chessboard, one chip per a square. A move consists in selecting two chips and moving each - if possible for both - to the next square below its [...]

This is a small book written by one of my boys and illustrated by the other. The idea is along the lines discussed in my previous post. Any group of objects has an associated attribute that reflects on the size of the group. This attribute is called Number; its presence and uniqueness is what allows [...]

The famous British philosopher, mathematician, and author, the Nobel Prize winner, Bertrand Russell was known for his acrimonious wit and sharp observations. One of his oft-quoted pronouncements - when is taken out of context - is a persistent cause of embarrassment to math educators and mathematicians. ... mathematics may be defined as the subject in [...]

March 14 is practically an official π day. Why is that? March is the fourth month of the widely accepted Gregorian calendar and, not incidentally, π ≈ 3.14. There are dissenting voices that claim July 22 as a more appropriate day for the celebration because 22/7 (≈ 3.14286) is a better approximation to the real [...]

I cannot recollect which book it was but I do remember it was a book by a famous mathematician who wrote in Introduction that to write a book is the best way to learn a new topic. I got this memory flash when reading an article in Mathematics Teacher: Our teachers misled us, but we [...]

Euclid did not know yet that the same constant (π) appears in the formula for the circumference and the area of a circle. Archimedes did, athough his method of approximating either by exausting the circle with regular polygons does not make this quite obvious. In the 16th century, Leonardo da Vinci, and in the 17th [...]

Jay Mathews from the Washingtom Post wrote a follow up on a recent report by the Brookings Institution scholar Tom Loveless. Loveless is one of the nation's leading experts on PISA and TIMSS. He has been part of the cohorts of specialists who advise those programs. In his report he says the first international test [...]

This is a quote from an article by Liz Dwyer from the Good Education website. Has America really fallen behind the rest of the world in academic achievement? According to a new report from the nonprofit Brookings Institution, all the doom-and-gloom commentary suggesting that we've fallen from the top spot simply isn't true. And, even [...]