CTK Insights

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 identity although simple, is rather surprising. It could be verified by raising the right-hand side to the power of 3: One way of accidently running into this identity is by means of Cardano’s cubic formula applied to the third degree equation The formula will produce terms that include cubic roots. On the other hand, [...]

I have just finished a review of Joseph Mazur’s What’s Luck Got to Do with It? As far as gambling is concerned I claim complete innocence. Perhaps this is the reason the book appeared to me as a concise encyclopedia of gambling. The book traces the history of gambling from the prehistoric times to the [...]

I’ll be hosting the next Math teachers at play blog carnival. A blog carnival is a publisher’s way of networking. By now, there are hundreds if not thousands of various blog carnivals. Submit your article if the scope of this particular one suits your interests. The dead line for the next issue is July 14, [...]

I thought it could be a good idea to collect the links that narrate Diane Ravitch’s story which impressed me on two accounts: A notable educator appears to have switched sides in the “math wars” discourse. Taking the sides, in the first place, appears to have been based on tastes, upbringing, experiences, but not on [...]

A recent article at MailOnline by Laura Clark made public the findings of a research conducted over the past 5 years by the experts at the Higher Education Policy Institute. As many as 12,000 children a year miss out on university places because they were born in the summer, research shows. Children born late in [...]

Every parent is likely to have had an experience I once read about. A father placed four sweets on a table and asked his 4 year old daughter to count. She did this perfectly: one, two, three, four. On his prompting she also observed that there were 4 sweets. The father suggested she pick one [...]