If we’re going to focus on special triangles, might as well really focus on special triangles, right? Rather than having kids label the “special” angles (multiples of 30 and 45 degrees) on a unit circle, I made up cardstock special triangles that matched the protractor-grid trig reference sheets.  Students labelled the side lengths with a hypotenuse…

Do you teach trig? Do you wish your students had a solid understanding of how to relate trig ratios beyond 90 degrees to the unit circle? Are you tired of kids asking which button to press? Well … I can’t say for sure if this solves your problem, because I haven’t used it in my…

Yesterday, a particularly racially-insensitive game about the slave trade started catching the attention of @mdawriter and other people who care about race and education.  The clips passed around showed that the core gameplay used Tetris mechanics, but with black bodies being loaded onto a slave ship.  There were also shots of stereotypical dialog (“I pity…

My Object Lessons essay, “How the Ballpoint Pen Killed Cursive“, is now up at The Atlantic.  (Woot!) I’ll likely be posting some follow-up thoughts and photos that didn’t get used for the piece here later.  (I will read comments here but if you have a real rebuttal you’re waiting to pull out, might as well…

This post is about politics, racism, murder, and statistical numeracy. This past week, Canada’s Minister of Aboriginal Affairs insulted the chiefs he was meeting with by pushing the blame for murdered and missing Indigenous women (MMIW) onto the Indigenous community. He used a previously unreleased statistic – because numbers can’t lie, right? *gag* – to make his…

So yesterday I popped into Staples to recycle a toner cartridge and walked past this: The sign said it was on sale for $2.97.  Next to it was a rack of TI-83’s for ten million, I mean $125.00. One could buy an entire class set of these Staples things and still have like thirty dollars left…

(Read it enough times and you start wanting to pronounce it as Japanese) Invent to Learn is free for a few days this week on Kindle again, and Dr. Gary Stager has another essay out just recently. The paper gives Dr. Stager’s snapshot view of how the maker movement is doing, and how it plays…

I am less job hunting now than I was before. I’ve got something regular for the next month and a half, at least. (And it includes teaching calculus, which is pretty awesome.)

I am job hunting. I haven’t been fired, laid off, or anything. Nothing has changed since the start of the school year. But something’s different than last year.  I’m on-call, no regular hours, and haven’t been getting phoned as regularly as I have on my on-call days in the last few years.  It also comes…