@phonner@mathstodon.xyz
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phonner

@phonner@mathstodon.xyz

Math teacher, instructional coach, author (Painless Statistics), columnist (Quanta Magazine).

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phonner, to random
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You might think that teachers who complain that their students can't do X might eventually realize that since it's their job to teach their students to do X they are actually complaining about themselves. But you would be wrong.

phonner, to random
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I was recently subject to local TV news for the first time in a while. Still the same. Pretty much every story is BE AFRAID BE VERY AFRAID! with some occasional human interest thrown in to break up the monotony.

phonner, to math
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Inspired by my brilliant student (https://mathstodon.xyz/deck/@phonner/112419322877058443) I've been playing around with (e)-like sums. Here's a fascinating one!

[ \sum_{n=0}^{\infty} {\frac{n^4}{n!}}=15e ]
This is strange enough to provoke wonder, but simple enough to serve as an entry-point to an interesting generalization.

#Math #Calculus

phonner, to random
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There are very few circumstances under which I would choose to eat a raisin.

phonner, to math
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Brian Conrad, the Stanford mathematician who has written extensively about the problems with the proposed California Mathematics Framework (CMF), is now the subject of a formal complaint filed with Stanford University by the President of the central section of the California Math Council accusing him of "reckless disregard for academic integrity".

https://sites.google.com/view/publiccommentsonthecmf/#h.u9k2csw8r9s4

phonner, to random
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Logged into Twitter to look around, as I occasionally do. I was met with:

• Humblebrag moralizing from people who don't understand the morals they are bragging about possessing
• Several posts intentionally designed to elicit a negative reaction from me
• A few thoughtful posts with no engagement whatsoever
• Four people complaining about Twitter and/or social media
• Two people I miss hearing from

phonner, to math
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Something I keep coming back to as a teacher and learner is Papert's concept of "Objects to Think With". In some ways, math for me is simply a collection of objects to think with. The guitar, too. Card games. The Rubik's cube. A basketball. And a simple way to be a lifelong learner is to continually seek out new objects to think with.

phonner, to math
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Wrapped up our unit on infinite series by constructing some fractions with interesting decimal representations!

[ \frac{100}{9899} = 0.01010203050813213455... ]
#math #calculus

phonner, to random
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Today I learned a sugar plum is just a ball of sugar.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sugar_plum

phonner, to ukteachers
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Texas will use AI to grade free response questions on standardized exams for reading, writing, science, and social studies this year.

"For $50, students and their parents can request a rescore if they think the computer .. got it wrong."

https://www.texastribune.org/2024/04/09/staar-artificial-intelligence-computer-grading-texas/

phonner, to random
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I righted a lifetime wrong this weekend by finally learning to whistle with my fingers.

phonner, to math
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My latest column for @QuantaMagazine is about the many ways recursion can be used across math classes, and starts with one of my all time favorite math problems!

https://www.quantamagazine.org/math-that-connects-where-were-going-to-where-weve-been-20240322/

#Math #MathEd

phonner, to math
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Student 1: That's the craziest shape I've ever seen!
Student 2: That's a hyperbola.
Student 1: And that was hyperbole.

Believe it or not, a true story!

phonner, to math
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I was excited to present a new workshop for teachers tonight titled "The Geometry of Statistics"! I love that I am continually learning as a teacher, and I'm fortunate to have opportunities to share what I learn with other teachers.

https://mrhonner.com/archives/21683

#Math #MathEd #Statistics #LinearAlgebra #Geometry

phonner, to math
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I once sat in a department meeting where a teacher loudly and seriously asserted that students learn better when chalk is used, and others nodded along in agreement.

phonner, to random
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You know who is a super cool and nice person in real life? @AlSweigart! And I totally forgot to ask him about his hobby of picking up litter.

phonner, to random
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I really don't understand why people who left Twitter angry and disillusioned would use Bluesky. It's vulnerable to the same problems. It was started by the exact same person!

phonner, to TodayILearned
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People tell me my job is easy

You get summers off.

You only work nine months of the year.

You’re done at 3 pm.

You get paid to babysit.

Students at that school won’t succeed anyway, so you don’t have to do much.

Students at that school will succeed anyway, so you don’t have to do much.

Teaching advanced courses is easy. My students don’t even know the basics.

It must be easy to teach those students. Mine can’t handle that kind of work.

I wish I got to teach those students. Mine aren’t that engaged.

You just walk around asking questions. Your students are the ones doing everything.

https://mrhonner.com/archives/21673

phonner, to math
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My latest column for @QuantaMagazine is about one of my favorite mathematical ideas: transitivity! Well, technically it's about intransitivity. Also, inspired by the football playoffs!

https://www.quantamagazine.org/the-surprisingly-simple-math-behind-puzzling-matchups-20240125/

phonner, to math
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Some things in math will never cease to amaze me no matter how many times I see them. Like Fourier Series: Take a crazy periodic function, and approximate it by a sum of sines and cosines of increasing frequency.

#math #calculus

Animation showing the Fourier series approximation to a crazy-looking discontinuous function. The Fourier Series approximation is shown term-by-term, with the curve getting increasing better as an approximation.

phonner, to random
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Sad to hear of the passing of mathematician Nick Higham. I didn't know him, but I learned a great deal from his writing, including his excellent blog.

https://nhigham.com/

phonner, to math
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Another year, another few students suggesting a brilliant approach to computing ( \int\sqrt{1-x^2} dx)!

https://mrhonner.com/archives/20967

#Math #Calculus

phonner, to math
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My Tests are So Hard

Everywhere I've taught, I've worked with teachers who bragged about how hard their tests are. It's not rigorous. It's lazy.

https://mrhonner.com/archives/21543

phonner, to math
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Started our trigonometry unit yesterday and shared one of my favorite articles from Evelyn Lamb: Ten Secret Trig Functions Your Math Teachers Never Taught You.

I'm thinking about putting a haversine identity on the next test.

https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/roots-of-unity/10-secret-trig-functions-your-math-teachers-never-taught-you/

phonner, to random
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Sometimes I want to find something in my old Twitter feed but don't want to log in to Twitter to do it. Luckily there's Nitter.net, a publicly accessible Twitter clone! A perfect solution until they disable it.

https://nitter.net/mrhonner

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