EDUC 847 – LESSON #7
READING
  • Letters to a Young Mathematician – Ian Stewart

CLASSROOM EXPERIMENTATION
  • Teach several lessons without notes. You may provide notes to the students in a different format as you see fit.

JOURNALING
  • Comment on Stewart’s book chapter. Does this help you answer the question – Why do we have to learn this?
  • Comment on the two different ways in which I have modelled to teach a lesson – teach first, do second vs. do first, teach second. What are the similarities? What are the relative strengths of each? What situations could you envision one being better than the other?
  • Comment on teaching without notes. How did it go? Talk a little bit about the students’ reactions.

PROBLEM SOLVING
  • Picture to yourself a length of rope, lying on a table in front of you. The cross section of the rope is a regular N sided polygon. Slide the ends of the rope towards you so that it almost forms a circle.
Now mentally grasp the ends of the rope in your hands. You are going to glue the ends of the rope together but before you do, twist your right wrist so that the polygonal end rotates through one nth of a full revolution. Repeat the twisting a total of T times, so that your mental wrist has rotated through T nths of a full revolution. NOW glue the ends together, so that the polygonal ends match with edges glued to edges.
When the mental glue has dried, start painting one facet (flat surface) of the rope and keep going until you find yourself painting over an already painted part. Begin again on another facet not yet painted, and use another colour.
How many colours do you need?

THINGS TO REMEMBER

  • No class next week (Feb 11, 2014) – have a nice break.
  • Boaler paper due next meeting (Feb 18, 2014). Email it to me prior to this (preferably in word format).