December 2013 Brain Teaser Solution

Q: How can you make the following equation true by drawing only one straight line: 5+5+5=550 ?
A: Draw a line on the first plus sign. This turns it into a 4! The equation then becomes true: 545+5=550.

Solution 2: Use the line to make the = into an unequal sign:

To think differently about the SAT...

Here is my letter published by the New York Times in response to E.D. Hirsch's How To Stop the Drop in Verbal Scores
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/19/opinion/how-to-stop-the-drop-in-verbal-scores.html

To the Editor:

Early childhood education can certainly be improved, but there are additional measures that will increase verbal scores on the SAT:

¶Subscribe to and complete daily the free SAT Question of the Day.

¶Take the 10 timed exams in The College Board’s Official SAT Study Guide.

Even adults should consider studying for and taking the SAT as a cognitive challenge. When I studied to retake the SAT in 2009, 29 years after I first took it, I filled in gaps in my education.

My verbal score increased over 200 points from high school — partly from living a few more decades but mostly from cracking the books. Jack LaLanne got us to exercise our bodies; now it is time to exercise our minds.

ROBIN SCHWARTZ
Bronx, Sept. 20, 2011

The writer is a math educator and author of the Build Math Confidence newsletter.

Personal Development and Education

Success literature such as John Maxwell re: leadership or Jim Rohn re: personal development is often highly prized by salespeople because they need motivation and persistence to keep at their game.  I propose that students and teachers could highly benefit from these messages as they are always there when you want them!  Audio is especially helpful see below for Jim Rohn The Challenge to Succeed
By mixing personal development with education, we can help students, teachers and parents buy in to the idea of hard work and persistence that can vastly improve Math education outcomes and enjoyment!
Some of my favorites:  

The Math Classroom Management and Leadership Tool Kit Part II

Other ideas for classroom management and leadership:
Environmental changes: Lights up, lights down Open door, close door
Walk around with a pen so you can mark up student work
Popsicle sticks with student names for cold calling
Hands on activities
Guest speakers
Skeleton for notes

In today's fast paced society, where in person meetings must compete with online games and social media, we can help create opportunities for students to be actively learning.  This is a challenge as students may not see the importance of Math and/or education.  If we are willing to change modalities and keep up the pace, we may be able to lead our students and  engage them for a longer period of time thereby creating more learning opportunities.

Ideally, we would like students to be self-motivated but more on that in the next post.

The Math Classroom Management and Leadership Tool Kit Part I

Students can be a tough audience.  Most students are in Math class because it is a requirement so what can teachers do to keep students focused and engaged?  I know I cannot always delight and engage my Precalculus students for 75 minutes at a time.  It is hard to remember the "tool kit" in the moment.  Please send suggestions via email or post comments if you have any other suggestions to add or modify this "tool kit"

This partial list includes modalities of learning and teaching as well as physical items that may help in the Math classroom.

Using a timer (displaying it sometimes)
Switching between using technology and not
Calculator use vs not
Voting systems like remote clickers or if cell phones are allowed www.polleverywhere.com (this worked well for one section but the other section posted up inappropriate comments that displayed in real time on the screen in front of the classroom -- yikes!)
Independent work including exit slips/tickets, checkpoints and quizzes
Group work with groups they choose or groups you choose

Part II will include more Tool Kit items so please stay tuned

Math is Interesting and Exciting (as opposed to boring)

This week, Math Confidence's blog will contain posts in response to today's (Sunday 12/8/13) NYT Editorial "Who Says Math is Boring?".

The article focused on four ideas:

A More Flexible Curriculum
Very Early Exposure to Numbers
Better Teacher Preparation
Experience in the Real World

I will be tweeting a link to this blog for each new idea each weekday this week as I would like to add a few of my own ideas
Here is the Original OpEd link: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/08/opinion/sunday/who-says-math-has-to-be-boring.html