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Read Polya's Ten Commandments for Mathematics teachers, displayed on
the right. I found these, not as a list, in his book Mathematical Discovery, which I recommend.
New ways of teaching geometry.
I think that students who do not do geometry well do not see it well. Here is a set of lessons built around what I call natural geometric structures. I am developing this all the time.
Seminar
This is the course where I am exempt from the school
curriculum, so I teach my own, which involves doing
whatever I think is interesting at the moment. This
year I have been emphasizing estimating skills and
statistical methods, particularly as they are used
in computer graphics. These methods are implemented
using Photoshop (remember that all computer programs
are just big math packages) and Mathematica. Now we ae seeing
how graphs and matrices relate.
Geometry
I spend most of my time with this, enough to have some
thoughts about it.
Interesting Mathematics
This one is already fully operational. Lots of stuff about geometry and graphing, along with whatever else interested me at some time or other.
4D
Material developed by and for my course in the fourth
dimension.
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sigur(dot)steve at paideiaschool(dot)org
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Polya's Ten Commandments for Mathematics teachers
1. Know your subject.
2. Be interested in your subject.
3. Know about the ways of learning: the best way to learn anything
is to discover it by yourself.
4. Try to read the faces of your students, try to see their expectations
and difficulties, put yourself in their place.
5. Give them not only information, but "know-how," attitudes
of mind, the habit of methodical work.
6. Let them learn guessing.
7. Let them learn proving.
8. Look out for such features of the problem at hand as may be
useful in solfing the problems to come -- try to discose the general
pattern that lies beind the present concrete situation.
9. Do not give away your whole secret at once -- let the students
guess before you tell it -- let them find out for themselves as
much as is feasable.
10. Suggest it; do not force it down their throuts. |
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