Educators are quick to find fault with rote memorization. Companies with products to sell, however, will spend millions of dollars on rote memorization. Mindless repetition is the essence of advertising: a good image shown many times, a good slogan broadcast over and over again. It must work. That amount of money doesn’t often lie. Yet […]
Vi Hart tweeted a link to this song about Phi, the Golden Mean. It’s not quite a Bach fugue, but it’s real…or is it transcendental?. I ♥ φ Λ I ♥ ♥
Let’s assume you have a pie to share with your friends. Each will receive a piece the same size. Is it not intuitively obvious that the size of the piece varies inversely with the number of friends: more friends, smaller piece; fewer friends, bigger piece.
The value of dimes varies directly with the number of dimes. This appears self-evident. That it can be expressed algebraically as v = md ought also to be obvious to intermediate algebra students. Yet it’s not. Why? Does anyone have an answer? I have been teaching direct and inverse variation in class this week and […]