I really do enjoy cooking. Sometimes, it’s a therapeutic form of stress relief. Sometimes, I like to cook seasonal dishes — the first chill of autumn is exciting. Not only because it indicates that Texas summer has lost its death grip on us but also because I can get out my gumbo pot. Fractions in the Kitchen? Get out. Recently, on a weekend morning I was making a breakfast pie (recipe here, because I’m not a mean cook). It’s one of my go-to recipes for an easy, delicious, homecooked breakfast meal. I’ve made this for years and gotten it down […]
Legislative Update – May 2017
The 140 days of the 85th Texas Legislature draw to a close at the end of May. And as with teachers and students at the end of the school year, it’s crunch time. Lots of education bills were filed, many relating to mathematics education. Here are the three that I’m watching this week. There are many other important bills, some relating to education, out there. But these are the ones I think have the most potential to affect Texas mathematics education. I’ll update this blog entry as the session moves. Current time stamp is at the top, and I’ll make […]
Curve Fitting with Flood Data
The Backstory I’m a Houston boy. I was born there and grew up there. My family lives there. I lived there long enough to know that it’s a subtropical environment that, periodically, gets a deluge of rain. Some of the storms have names like Claudette, Allison, or Ike. Most of them do not, like the storm that sat over western and northwestern portions of the Houston area on April 17, 2016. Overnight on Sunday, large portions of Southeast Texas received as much as 20 inches of rain in a few hours. On Monday morning, many people woke up with water […]
The Fish Was THIS Big!
A Fish Story I’ve said this before, but mathematics occurs in the strangest of places. Walking down the street in Puerto Vallarta, Mexico, I was admiring the architecture. Lo and behold, suddenly there appeared a tile mosaic of a fish on the side of one building. I’m such a math nerd, so I couldn’t help but notice the square tiles and wonder, how many tiles did it take to make that fish? Or in math speak, “what is the area of the fish?” Then the teacher in me emerged. I’ve been on a kick lately with the “What do you […]
Quadratic Functions and Projectile Motion
Throwing Your Weight Around No, dear, you cannot change -16 to -12 in the quadratic equation because it factors more nicely. –Disgruntled Curriculum Specialist, Could Be Your ISD Ever feel like every quadratic equation has an x-squared term with a coefficient of -16 or -4.9? -16 factors nicely but -4.9 certainly doesn’t. Projectile motion is a great context and is highly relevant both to students and to a variety of careers and situations. Coefficients of -16 and -4.9 are directly related to Earth’s gravity, so it’s hard to change those values so that the curve makes a prettier graph or so […]
