Math Confidence Newsletter
Volume 23
April 2011
In This Issue
Math Confidence:You Tube
Recommended Reading
Final Answer?
Mental Math for Confidence
Brain Teaser
Math Confidence Video on You Tube   
Log Video Photo
Refine Thinking and Improve Scores with "Final Answer?"
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Quote of the Month
"Nothing will work unless you do"
Maya Angelou
The Recommended Reading, Rapt, is about distractedness in today's society and how one can improve one's outlook and life through focus and attention.  This month's video is about student thinking and how the compare/contrast of multiple choice can boost understanding and scores.  Mental Math is still important even though calculators are everywhere -- check out Metro NY MAA Spring Newsletter for Robin's article Mental Math BC (Before Calculators).
Recommended Reading 
Rapt by Winifred Gallagher

In our fast-paced high-tech culture, people feel attention deficit even if they do not have ADD!!  "Life is really about what you focus on" says author Winifred Gallagher in her book about Attention and the Focused Life.  Rapt describes how concentrating on the task at hand helps people experience "flow" and become happier and more productive. This psychology book and its initial quote by William James, "My experience is what I agree to attend to", has positive implications for work, school and life. 

Rapt Book Review

New York Times Science Times on Rapt
Rapt on Amazon
Audio Interview with Winifred Gallagher
Video about Rapt
Math Confidence Blog on Flow
Improve Attention and Scores with "Final Answer?"
Multiple choice questions are deliberately designed with distractors. This month's video is based on the famous "Is that your final answer?" thanks to Who Wants to be a Millionaire?.  This question helps students to refine their thinking process and make fewer "fuzzy errors" (as opposed to conceptual mistakes) and is important as scores do not always reflect knowledge and skills because of "good wrong answers". The educational psychology term for this type of strategy is metacognition or thinking about one's thinking. Metacognition is one of the benefits of Math as these thinking processes can be applied to any endeavor.
Mental Math for Skills and Confidence

Why sharpen mental Math when calculators can do all the work?  Math has become more analytical and less computational since the 1900's.  Although the calculator has significantly impacted the way that Math is taught and learned, mental Math is still beneficial. Important mental Math skills include knowing your facts, multiplying by tens, and 100 Pairs (for example, knowing that 100 - 82 = 18).  Click here for Robin's Mental Math BC article in the Spring 2011 MetroNY Math Association of America newsletter.  Mental Math can help with CAPTCHA (of course it will not know if you use a calculator!!).

CAPTCHA on Wikipedia 

Math Workout on your phone 

Mental Math Tricks 

Brain Teaser 
Numbers thru Funnel
Joe buys a 5 foot long fishing pole but cannot take the bus home because the bus driver will not let him board the bus with anything over 4 feet long.  Joe goes to a hardware store and buys one thing then returns and boards the bus.  The pole can not be cut, bent, broken, or taken apart. What did Joe buy to allow him to board the bus with the fishing pole?

Answer to March's Brain Teaser: 48 mph.  Please click to see the solution: March 2011 Brain Teaser Solution
Thanks for reading!  How can we make this newsletter better?  Please send comments and suggestions to Robin mathconfidence@aol.com 
Sincerely,

 

Robin "the Math Lady" Schwartz
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