A Quick Way to Teach Students to Count/Write By 10’s and to 100

Once a student learns to count to ten, they can easily learn to count to one hundred. A quick way to teach students to count and write to 100, once they’ve learned to count/write from 1 to 10, is to have them to vertically write the numbers 1 through 10 on a sheet of paper and add zeros to each number, or better put to instantly learn to count by 10’s to 100. Emphasize that counting by 10’s is similar to counting from 1 to 10, i.e., one (1) becomes ten (10), two (2) becomes two-enty or twenty (20), three (3) becomes thirty (30), four (4) becomes fourty, five (5) becomes fifty, six (6) becomes sixty (60), seven (7) becomes seventy (70), eight (8) becomes eighty (80), nine (9) becomes ninety (90), and ten (10) becomes one hundred (100). Once the student has mastered this concept, have them to successively write the numbers one through nine (1-9) after each ten. And there it is…

Appropriate Use of Calculators and Multiplication Charts

Students should only be permitted use of calculators when they can manually and demonstrably solve the manner of problems for which they’d seek to use them, and/or to check derived answers. Otherwise, the students utilizing them would not be learning, and would fail any formal examination on which they would not be allowed use of calculators.

All students should be distributed and required to memorize multiplication charts; they should not be allowed to utilize them in class, however, unless they are knowledgeable of how to independently derive products from factors.

A Radical Equation

I saw this problem on the board of one of the classrooms of a high school where I substituted, and thought, “Wow”!!! It’s been a long time since I’ve been in an Algebra class. But looking into the problem and recalling some old mathematical principles that I learned way back when it dawned on me how simple this seemingly complicated problem really is. Click here to view the problem and explanation  http://www.slideshare.net/ymartin3/a-radical-equation

“She Is” IS a Complete Sentence

I intervened a while back during a lecture in which an instructor I was working with was teaching about complete and fragmented sentences. She’d written a list of sentences and fragmented sentences on the board that the students were to properly classify. The first sentence she listed was “She is.” As the instructor explained to the students that this was a “fragmented sentence,” I interjected that it was actually a complete sentence, “She” the (simple) subject and “is” the (simple) predicate or third person singular present tense of the verb “to be”… Although the term “is” is frequently used as a copula or linking verb, since it is a verb, its exclusive use with a subject forms a complete sentence. I decided that I’d run this by an English expert/instructor at another school where I’d accepted an assignment, and she agreed with me.  Kissing my brain.