Friday, December 19, 2014

Would it be possible to develop a Moore Method for teaching high school students mathematics?

Proposal: Would it be possible to develop a Moore Method for teaching high school students mathematics?

review moore method

find way to adapt to high school

contrast with existing programs

Comment 1.
The “Trki-Wiki” is now a group effort. Timothy Gowers, at Cambridge, started it as a collection of ‘tricks’ to solving math problems at all levels in 2009. Since it was a Wiki others could also add to it or edit it. In 2012 due to illness Gowers announced he might have to abandon the effort. Others felt it was so valuable ownership was distributed amongst other mathematicians.

Comment 2.
Russian Mathematics! I love the concept. From what little experience I have, all second hand, it seems even online participation is successful.

Comment 3.
Hung-Hsi Wu. Professor at Cal Berkeley who has devoted his life to the methodology of teaching grade school mathematics. He has numerous very approachable published articles at the link

Comment 4.
Gelfand was another Russian emigre to the U.S. A
professional mathematician who as a hobby started a correspondence school for teaching secondary school math. He wrote a series of beautiful little books for each subject. He's since passed away and the university that was supporting the project disbanded it. You can still buy his books, used, on Amazon. I have a set that I treasure. They are uniquely suited for isolated self-study as that was the concept of correspondence classes.

Comment 5.
Mathematics is comprehensible: After what ever road you take everybody still ends up at the same understanding. There isn’t English math, or American math, or black math (actually been proposed), or math for girls, poets, business, liberal arts, etc, etc. It’s all just math. Period.

Comment 6.
Richard Feynman studied calculus from a popular little book first published in 1910: “Calculus Made Easy,” by Silvanus Thompson which was re-issued and slightly updated by the famous Martin Gardner in 1998. The book starts with an “Ancient Simian Proverb:"
“--What one fool can do another can.”

Comment 7.

Don’t give up!!!

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Link to AMS article "Is Moore Better (In Precalculus?)"




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Friday, December 5, 2014

Einstein Archives, Digitized Papers

A short post of immense significance. Caltech has provided a link to the digitized collected papers of Albert Einstein. Now one can just find everything the MAN wrote in original German and English translation. No longer any need to save pennies to buy a hardbound version, although who wouldn't want a collection of his 1905 year's papers?

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