Not all of us are parents or teachers, but I’ve long asserted that education is a “public good,” something that each and every one of us should be very, very concerned with. When kids don’t graduate or graduate with poor
Math shares its awareness month with another mission that is very near and dear to my heart: It is also Organ Donor Awareness Month. When I found that out earlier this week, I thought I’d indulge myself a bit and spend
Most folks readily tell me that they don’t do any math in a day. Not a stitch. So maybe they don’t sit down and solve for x or graph a quadratic equation or use the Pythagorean Theorem. But we all do math every day.
One of the questions I get most often from parents is this: How can I help my kids from being anxious about math like I am? And for a math nerd like me, the answer is pretty simple. I’m unnaturally aware
Lots of people make one of two incorrect assumptions about me. I’m a writer, so they initially assume that I don’t have a good relationship with math. And when they find out that I have a degree in math, they assume
So the person who inspired this series on Algebra is my dear friend Michele “Wojo” Wojciechowski – a very funny writer and stand-up comic. In her honor, I thought I’d wrap things up with a post looking at the humorous side of algebra.
Parks and Recreation, the Amy Poeler-driven mocumentary on NBC about a small-town parks department, features a tightly wound character, Chris Traeger, whose favorite word is literally – as in: “Biking for charity is literally one of my interests on Facebook.” It’s funny because it
Math is black-and-white, with right-or-wrong answers. It’s hard to color outside the lines in math. While I often argue with this point, there is some truth to it. Just like grammar, chemistry and baking, math is a pretty precise subject
A Math for Grownups follower asked me earlier this week to define algebra, and I thought that was an excellent place to start this month-long discussion. I think that most people might be surprised by what is generally found under the
Hating on algebra is all the rage these days. From New York Times editorials to cute little Facebook images, it seems that we’re settling into a big assumption: algebra is not useful to the average person. For the most part, this idea
So last summer, I wrote about my disdain for math-geared summer camps. And I was summarily schooled by my friend Lynn Salvo, founder of MathTree, which offers summer camps in Virginia, Washington D.C., Maryland and Delaware. She was right, of course,
New here? You’ve stumbled upon January’s Review of Math Basics here at Math for Grownups. This week, we’re doing a quick refresher of fractions. Monday was multiplication, so if you missed that, you might want to take a quick look before reading further.