# All Questions

3,190 questions
Filter by
Sorted by
Tagged with
19k 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 ...
17k 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, ...
10k 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. ...
15k 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 ...
25k 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?
22k views

### Why are induction proofs so challenging for students?

This forum already has many good, simple examples of induction proofs, a great resource. As I am soon to teach induction for the $n^\textrm{th}$ time—this time to some perhaps under-prepared ...
19k 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 (...
19k 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 ...
6k views

9k views

### Formula sheets and books during tests and exams

Some teachers make memorizing formulas, definitions and others things obligatory, and forbid "aids" in any form during tests and exams. Other allow for writing down more complicated expressions, ...
12k views

### How can I estimate the length of an exam?

Background: I am fairly new at teaching, and in every subject I have taught, I have had difficulty estimating the length and difficulty of an exam. I need to write an exam for a university senior-...
4k views

### What am I supposed to be learning with long proofs of the main theorems in class?

It seems like this is exclusively how (most) people teach graduate/upper div math classes. They go through the proof of some big theorem, sometimes it might take two lectures. It's obviously important....
3k views

### Effects of early study of advanced books

Context: There was recently a question on Math.SE: Inferior to Other Younger and Brighter Kids which starts as follows: I'm a high school student (Junior/Grade 11) and I'm currently studying ...
2k views

### What does math education research know about difficulty vs. effectiveness?

I've asked basically the same question previously on on math.SE, then cogsci.SE without much response, surely here is the place to ask this. As anecdotal evidence is plentiful, but unfortunately ...
19k views

### Why do we teach complex numbers?

In algebra II, USA, we teach our students complex numbers. However, after algebra II, they never use complex numbers until pretty much complex analysis. The whole point of teaching them complex ...