Monday, November 30, 2009

Creating a new web log

One of my projects I'm working on is a newspaper for my literacy class. I'm actually having quite a bit of fun writing and creating articles for this make-believe mathematics-related periodical. In researching material to include in my newspaper, I've come across some interesting tidbits:

  • Michael Jordan was a math major
  • Teri Hatcher was a math and an engineering major
  • according to The Wall Street Journal, the top three jobs to have are all math-related (for you inquiring minds, that would be in order: mathematician, actuary and statistician)
  • Hirojuki Goto holds the world record for reciting the number Pi to over 42,000 digits (it took him only 9 hours to memorize)

Anyway while all that interesting, yet trivial, information was fun to gather, it reminded me of the need to set up another web log. In preparation for my student teaching next semester, I would like to have a blog for my students to read and leave comments (I'm hoping I won't have to heavily edit comments and questions) as well as for me to post classroom-relate information (such as homework assignments, test averages, upcoming unit topics and anything else remotely math- or classroom-related.

I also love brain teasers, logic problems, and riddles. I'm not good at them so I should more accurately state "I love looking at the answers to riddles/problems/puzzles and then smacking my forehead and saying 'I should have been able to solve that!' " Perhaps I would throw in a problem/puzzle for the week and see how many students would even have the curiosity to figure out.

Anyway, I'd love to know what else you think would be helpful on a math teacher's blog. And if you have any names to suggest for this blog, I'm open to these suggestions as well.

Thanks!

And here's a little brain bender for you:
cool-math-problem-patterns
What number should replace the question mark?

4 comments:

Jonathan said...

4?

Bryant said...

I also say 4

Erika Hettinger said...

Definitely 4. :)

West By East: said...

I thought Jonathan was suggesting I name my new blog "4" and I was scratching my head trying to figure out the correlation between the number 4 and teaching math. When Bryant also agreed with four, it finally clicked that you were responding to the math puzzler (how quickly I had forgotten about the problem!).

Yes, J, B, and E - you're all correct (as if you needed my affirmation on that):
(4+8)3=36
(8+5)4=52
(x+6)3=30 (solve for x)

Great job folks!