All posts by Scott Steketee
A Follow-Up to the Interior Angle Sum
This post is a follow-up to Sarah Stephens' guest post of a week ago, in which she described a lesson using embodied cognition to help students make sense of the interior angle sum theorem for triangles, not just as an abstract concept, but as a property grounded in their concrete physical experiences.
The Interior Angle Sum: An Embodied Investigation
[This guest post by Sarah Stephens, a senior at Pennsylvania State University, describes a lesson she created as part of her Senior Honors Thesis on leveraging embodied cognition to help students develop abstract mathematical concepts.]
As a soon-to-be classroom mathematics teacher, I have taken special interest in the field of … Continue Reading ››
Revisiting the Hundred Chart
With a few adjustments, we can make the Hundred Chart more intuitive and more useful for students. This post explains why the improvements are needed and describes how students can build a physical model that more accurately corresponds to the number system.
Multiplication Is Not Repeated Addition
On the NCTM discussion site myNCTM, there's currently an extended discussion about "Division and multiplication of fractions." As the discussion has continued, I've grown concerned with what I see as a fundamental problem with the way we often introduce multiplication as repeated addition: "Multiplying 4 by 5 means we're combining five groups of four items. … Continue Reading ››
Adding and Subtracting Integers
A recent post on the my NCTM discussion group asked about tools to help students visualize and understand addition and subtraction of integers.
I always found this confusing for some of my Algebra 1 students, mainly because they had been told to memorize some rules about whether to add or subtract the two integers and … Continue Reading ››
Binomial Multiplication and Concreteness Fading
I was delighted that Daniel recently posted our Binomial Multiplication sketches in Web Sketchpad format. I thought about those sketches when I noticed a fairly new myNCTM thread on "When and How do we phase out the body in math education?"
This thread raises a very important question for us as … Continue Reading ››
Function Dances at NCTM
At the 2017 NCTM Annual Meeting I was invited to do a short Wednesday-afternoon presentation on Function Dances in the NCTM Networking Lounge. (Here's the handout from the presentation.)
The idea of function dances is to get students (or in this case teachers) moving around, acting as the independent and dependent … Continue Reading ››
International Congress for Mathematics Education Part 2
I began this post on Friday night in Hamburg Germany, near the end of ICME, the quadrennial international math-education conference that's been both exhilarating and exhausting. I’m now finishing it on the airplane headed back home.
As interesting as many of the presentations have been, they've also been … Continue Reading ››
International Congress for Mathematics Education Part 1
I'm currently attending the 13th International Congress on Mathematics Education (ICME) in Hamburg, Germany, with well over 1000 math educators from around the world. Professor Gabriele Kaiser opened the conference with a statement of solidarity with Turkish mathematics teachers and researchers who at the last minute were unable to attend due to newly imposed government … Continue Reading ››