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Dividing Fractions – How and Why
Ask many adults why flipping/inverting/multiplying by the reciprocal works, and you’ll likely find out that they are just as confused now as they were when they were young students. What’s a reciprocal, anyway?
Read More »Multiplying by Multiples of Ten
This third grade standard has its roots in K-2 standards, and is fundamental to understanding more complex mathematical problems, including multi-digit multiplication and division.
Read More »Slow is Smooth. Smooth is Fast.
Ok, here’s the deal: I feel like the way most of us currently assess and view mathematical fluency and ability (timed tests) is complete garbage. Now that I have that out of the way, let me explain myself….
Read More »What Do Turtles Have to Do with Multiplication?
When teachers (and other well-meaning adults) can’t explain something in a way that students can understand, sometimes they resort to cute tricks, gimmicks, and shortcuts.
Read More »Playing with Equations
Putting myself into the shoes of a fourth grade student, I can’t imagine a much more dry, repetitive, and boring task than filling out worksheets with numbers that don’t mean anything.
Read More »You’ll Never Have a Multiplication Unit in Life
Often, we teach math skills in partitioned silos, inadvertently teaching our students to compartmentalize their thoughts, effectively hampering/shutting off their critical-thinking and ability to reason.
Read More »Teach the Math Behind the Methods
Let me start off with a confession: when I was a student, I had no idea what I was doing in math. Come to think of it, I don’t think many of my peers understood what was going…
Read More »Shifting Our Mathematical Mindsets
As the PD started, we were asked to write down three words to represent thoughts or emotions we had about our own math experiences when we were young students. My words? Confused, frustrated, and bored.
Read More »It’s Time to Do Away with Timed Tests and Times Tables
The way Americans have traditionally learned math can be likened to cooking a Betty Crocker cake. I learned math as a set of steps to take—rules and facts to be memorized—a recipe to follow.
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