Last Friday, my family adopted a sweet, little poodle puppy, named Zipper. The foster mother, Sally, had brought him from a Mexico shelter to her own home in Silver Springs, Md. During the home visit on Friday, we talked about
For the Love of Math
Dear Math Teacher
I’ve been talking with grownups about math for more than three years now. Parents, 20-somethings, writers, DIYers, seniors… they all have something in common: a piss-poor relationship with math. This bad attitude is probably your fault. The stories I hear
Getting Aware of Common Core Standards
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
Daily Digits: My math day
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.
Boston Marathon: How FBI profilers use math
We can all agree that the horrific events at Monday’s Boston Marathon sent a chill down our country’s collective spine. The two bombs that exploded have made us afraid and sad and hopeless. One message that seemed to ease many’s
Sharing Awareness with Kids: Bedtime Math
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
Math Awareness Month: What’s Your Story?
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
Math Summer Camps: Guest post by Lynn Salvo of MathTree
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,
That’s So Random: Getting sampling right
On Wednesday, we talked about sample bias, or ways to really screw up the results of a survey or study. So how can researchers avoid this problem? By being random. There are several kinds of samples from simple random samples to
One in a Million: How sample bias affects data
Continuing with our review of basic math skills, let’s take a little look-see at statistics. This field is not only vast (and confusing for many folks) but also hugely important in our daily lives. Just about every single thing we
Math Warriors: The comedic side of math
As I continue to crawl from under a mountain of work, I thought I’d share a really cool webseries that I discovered late last year. It’s not clear if the series will continue this spring or not, but you can
Multiplying and Dividing — Integer Style
Continuing on in our review of basic math, I welcome you to Day 2. The answers to Day 1 questions are at the bottom of the post — along with new questions. But first, let’s learn how to multiply and