Okay, so one of my students is a high school sophomore taking algebra and geometry in one year to catch up with her class. We're about halfway through the algebra course and she's got a quiz due tomorrow that she's going to submit online. One of the questions, though, has us both stumped --- mostly because it's so poorly worded. So here's the ( Read more... )

So help me, I cannot remember figuring out the concept of mathematical inverses (multiplicative and additive), let alone when they were first introduced to me. I guess at the time I didn't even think it was cool, probably because it was only explained to me in terms of how to solve simple algebra problems, and not in terms of "ok, so this is one ( Read more... )

...is a very, very good breakfast. It's also incredibly hippy and D-I-Y, but really, that's what makes it so good for me. I can't believe I went for so long thinking applesauce involved some kind of long, complicated process. But no! Apples, water, rice cooker, potato masher... and like an hour later I'm all set! Woo! Anyway, I got up this ( Read more... )

Or at least, I totally rock the house at playing with matrices, which is what my new student is doing in her high school pre-algebra class. Also, there was a beautiful, brief shining moment where I got to explain exactly what she was creating by computing the (multiplicative) inverse of a matrix, and how A-1(A) = I = A(A-1) is just like x-1(x) = 1 ( Read more... )