Category: Uncategorized
-
A Recent Development Late last month, around 23 October 2024, many newspapers carried the story that the State Council of Educational Research and Training (SCERT) in Maharashtra has decided to reduce the pass mark for mathematics and science from 35 to 20. The caveat is that students who have scored at least 20 marks but…
-
The Presenting Problem There is one big problem with being a mathematics tutor. You aren’t the students’ main teacher and hence you get to hear what the students have actually learned from their main teacher. Why is this a problem? Well, it exposes me to the ways in which we mathematics teachers regularly let our…
-
Looking Back, Looking Ahead The response to last week’s post on geometry was heartening. So I thought I would give the readers another small dose of geometry. Some of the ideas that arise from geometry are simple, yet so profound that it is hardly surprising that geometry was considered the pinnacle of human wisdom by…
-
The Presenting Problem In response to the previous post, in which I had categorically declared that the use of calculators in mathematics education is a hindrance to students, a former student asked me, “Do you think it would be feasible or even beneficial to move mathematical assessments from the current manipulation & computation to something…
-
Tools that Help There are tools that enhance one’s ability to understand. And there are tools that are a hindrance to understanding. For example, when I first came across a Phillips head screw and the screwdriver that accompanied it, I was blown away. I was intuitively able to see why this screw head was superior…
-
The Siege of Yodfat In AD 67, in the middle of the first Jewish-Roman War, a rag tag band of forty Jewish revolutionaries managed to get themselves besieged in Yodfat. Realizing they were going to be captured and perhaps tortured, the group decided that they would commit mass suicide. However, given the Jewish aversion to…
-
Confession Playing with numbers is one of my favorite ways to pass time. Of course, we can get to numbers per se in a variety of ways. One can be from simply doodling on a page. I remember drawing grids of dots on a page and playing all kinds of games with my classmates when…
-
Inhale Ok. It’s time for a little breather. On 17 March 2024 we began a series of posts on e. Then we moved to another series on principles of counting. Then last week we completed a series on π. All these were quite heavy and I’m sure some of you are still reeling from the…
-
Recapitulation We are in the middle of a series of posts on π. Our journey began with A Piece of the Pi which was followed by Off On a Tangent. Last week, I posted The Rewards of Repetition in which I promised that we would break down the Gauss-Legendre algorithm into the distinct parts. Of course, as mentioned…
-
The past week got quite busy all of a sudden and the week ahead also looks like it will be the same. I know I’m in the middle of a series of post on π. I will continue with the series in a couple of weeks. For now, I leave you with some collections of…
Acutely Obtuse 