Month: May 2015

Some years ago, in 1996 to be precise, I read this article: Davis, G. E. (1996) What is the difference between remembering someone post a letter and remembering the square root of 2? It was in the Proceedings of the 20th Conference for the International Group for the Psychology of Math Education. I’ve been thinking…

Here’s a short summary of the Random Walk activity: A student takes a random walk on a number line determined by flips of a fair coin: one step forward with a flip of a heads, and one step back with a flip of tails. After students propose questions about an individual’s random walk, the whole class,…

Eight years ago my colleagues and I were looking to create a series of lessons about probability that would build upon each other across middle and high school. We wanted to create an engaging activity that would inspire students to ask lots of questions about probability, and be one that students would remember years later. Being…

“Do you see what I mean?” When we talk about understanding, we often use words associated with vision and sight. Yet there is so much to the concept of “understanding” that does not fit the conventional definition of something that is literally “visible.” In my first year of teaching, 23 years ago, I asked my students to make…