Another black president

September 17, 2010
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In my Advanced Functions class I've been teaching a unit on Probability, and I wanted to illustrate the difference between permutations and combinations.  I set up four chairs at the front of the classroom and told my students I needed to form a four-person committee with a president, vice-president, secretary, and treasurer, and I was [...]

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I’m not here to entertain you

September 11, 2010
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Every once in a while one of my students will suggest that I should make my classes more "interesting" or "fun."  "You should write us a class song, and then you could sing it for us" one girl told me recently (most of my students know I'm in a band).  Or just the generic "Why [...]

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Teaching and boxing

July 21, 2010
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My wife's a boxer. She's been doing it a few years and has gotten good enough at it that she now helps with the training of some of the newer boxers who come to her gym.  The newbies are young and old, male and female, large and small.  Many of them begin with the idea [...]

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The class from hell

June 16, 2010
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A while back I was discussing one of my classes with Mr. A, another teacher at my high school, and asking his advice on some classroom management issues, and he began telling me about the worst class he'd ever had. This was a few years ago, he said, and he'd been teaching about 5 years.  [...]

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Dr. Rob’s classroom culture

May 31, 2010
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When I was in grad school for my teaching degree I took a math course called Modern Geometries (aka Non-Euclidean Geometries) and I enjoyed it a lot.  The subject matter was fascinating (e.g., situations where the shortest distance between two points is not a straight line, triangles whose interior angles don't add up to 180 [...]

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The 5 best things about my first week (back) in the classroom

February 25, 2010
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Last week I started a new job teaching high school math after several years being out of the classroom.  The first week went pretty well.  Here are the five best things about it (in no particular order). Meeting Jimi Hendrix - No lie, James Hendrix works at my school.  He goes by Jimi.  (Wouldn't you?) [...]

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How to turn off WordPress smart quotes

January 30, 2010
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Smart quotes (aka curly quotes) are what most word processor programs insert into your document when you type the quote marks key.  They're pretty to look at, but they cause problems if you use them in a text document that contains code intended to be read by a computer.  That's normally not a problem since [...]

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Dilbert notes a problem with the survey methodology

January 23, 2010
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How to align your custom header with your navbar

January 21, 2010
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If you use the Thesis theme for your WordPress blog, you might have created your own custom header image for your site (kind of like mine, above).  If so, you may have noticed that your header image doesn't seem to align correctly with your navbar.  To get your header image and your navbar aligned, you'll [...]

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Removing the whitespace at the top of your Thesis blog

January 19, 2010
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If you use the Thesis theme for your WordPress blog, you might have created your own custom header image for your site (kind of like mine, above).  If so, you may have noticed that there's a little bit of whitespace between the top of your browser window and the top of your header image (kind [...]

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