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18k views

What female mathematician can I introduce to my High School students?

I enjoy talking about Pythagoras when I teach the Pythagorean theorem. I sometimes mention Descartes when introducing Cartesian coordinates. And Leibniz and Newton are mentioned in many calculus ...
15k views

Unique candidate that fails

In the comments to David Speyer's answer here, he points out that "the distinction between 'if there is a formula, it is this one' and 'this formula works' is subtle." Does anyone have any simple, ...
8k views

How to assign homework when answers are freely available or attainable online?

I find that making homework meaningful is becoming increasingly challenging. Let us suppose that I am planning for next semester's first-semester or second-semester calculus course at my university. ...
13k views

Should I design my exams to have time-pressure or not?

Is it better to design an exam with fewer questions and relaxed timing or with more questions and a resulting time-pressure? One the one hand, it seems that students who really know the stuff will ...
17k views

What is a good handwriting font for mathematics?

My students frequently mix up my $t$'s with my $+$'s and my $y$'s with my $4$'s. What is a good handwriting font for distinguishing these and other easily confused symbols?
18k views

Impressive common misleading interpretations in statistics to make students aware of

Statistics are used everywhere; politicians, companies, etc. argue with the help of statistics. Since calculations are needed for the interpretation of statistics, such things should be taught in ...
18k views

What's a replacement for “married couples” in combinatorics problems?

Many counting problems start with the assumption that we have a certain number of men and women or a certain number of couples, with the assumption (often unstated) being that that gender is binary (...
5k views

10k views

Why are triangles so prevalent in high school geometry?

A colleague and I recently discussed what we call the "Triangle Trap." High school geometry covers a very large unit reflecting the common core: Classifying Triangles Triangle Angle Properties ...