What about linear equations?

By Anne Watson Why am I talking about linear equations?  Thinking about them takes me to several important hidden threads in school mathematics, wondering how learners might pull ideas together meaningfully. It is also helpful that there has been some research about ‘solving’ them. What is linear anyway? I started by searching textbooks and the […]

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Tanks, goats and buses- Anne Watson

Consistent use of images supports the understanding of mathematical structures. The outstanding examples of this in mathematics have become ‘canonical’, that is part of the mathematical canon. At school level these canonical images are: number line; function graphs (thankyou Descartes); 2-dimensional combination grids (thankyou Omar Khayyam and Cayley); Venn diagrams (thankyou Cantor and Charles Dodgson).  […]

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Handrails – Anne Watson

I have been floating the idea of treating key mathematics ideas as handrails for teachers and students.  Recently several positive comments about this perspective have floated back to me, so I am sharing the idea with you. In mathematics, teaching key ideas could be handrails. Handrails can be held, used as guides or supports, or […]

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What do students know about functions?

First, a bit of theory about learning.  In 1980, Shlomo Vinner, an Israeli mathematics educator, coined the terms ‘concept image’ and ‘concept definition’ to highlight the difference between what students actually know about a concept and the formal meaning of the concept. David Tall, an English mathematician and educator, is credited with promulgating the term […]

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The problems of problem-solving

In my last blog I set a task, which was to find out and explain what happens in this situation: Given a set of consecutive natural numbers from 1 to 2n, choose any n of them. Arrange these n numbers in ascending order. Next to them, in one-to-one correspondence, arrange the remaining numbers in descending […]

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Euclid knew about diagrams

Euclid knew that using similar diagrams over and over again, each time looking at them in a different way, was a powerful way to see mathematics as a connected whole. Euclid used similar diagrams several times throughout his Book 2 and Book 13 to provide visual reasoning contexts for relationships between segment lengths on straight […]

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Now you see it; now you don’t

I presented some visual approaches in an earlier blog called ‘Finding Nemo’ and I am now going to elaborate one of the ideas to show the value of looking at a mathematical structure in different ways.  Each of these needs learners to ‘see’ the diagram or expression in one way, and then in another way. […]

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