Page: Blog Posts

Pi Day Exponent Activity

This year on Pi Day I was teaching exponents, so I created an activity surrounding many of the common errors that I see many students make when working with expressions involving exponents. I have attached the file to this post, and I would hope that people would know what to do with it, but let…

Games, Activities, and Useful Web Tools.

Here’s a rundown of some of the games and activities that I’ve recently used in the classroom, along with various other useful links that I can see being applicable to learning and education. 1. Ed On Your Own Crossword Puzzles – This particular link from Ed on Your Own has a list of free printable math…

I Use Matrices in Everyday Life, Do You?

I am teaching a Finite Math class this semester and the majority of students in the class are business majors. I’m trying to make the class as relevant to them as possible, so I’ve been reading magazines such as INC, and Entrepreneur to try to get ideas for things that I can talk about in class.…

The Snooze Button is Now a Math Problem

Yesterday I came across this problem while planning a lesson on ratio and proportion: "When I woke up this morning, I hit the snooze button and got 10 extra minutes to sleep. Every time I hit the button, I get 10 extra minutes. At this rate, if my alarm first goes off at 5:30 and…

Rotten Tomatoes, Linear Equations, Ratio and Proportion

This problem came about because I was talking about solving the equation 4x + y = – 14 for y and there was a little confusion about how I could subtract 4x from – 14. Although this was really a problem with combining like terms, I figured that now was as good of a time…

New Application Problems from the Classroom

Here are few more problems that I came up with during today’s class: 1. Clyde owed 8 different people $4 each for some doughnuts that he bought to eat on his birthday. Then when he wasn’t looking, Hellman’s stole $4 from Clyde’s wallet. In order to reclaim his debt, Clyde needed to split up his…