On Sun, Jun 11, 2017 at 10:01 PM, Peter Farrell <funcalculus@gmail.com> wrote:
Jorge and Kirby,
Great ideas! You're preaching to the choir here. Especially the line "Why don't we toss out the Graphing Calculators and just learn a little bit of coding?" I spoke with the math department head at a rich private High School nearby who finished proving her school didn't need my techy, codey nonsense by saying, "We already use technology in our math classes: the TI-84."
The competitive spirit in me is encouraged by your news. So many schools are deliberately holding their kids back. That means more of my students will get the fun work, less of theirs. Yay. I know that sounds selfish, but it's their choice to self-cripple with TI-only curricula. You're in California right? A backward state by most accounts.
And once you have some practice creating functions to calculate derivatives and integrals, you can get fancy and personalize the notation like Kirby showed. The programmer can do anything, with a toolbox like Python!
Peter
I've got Jorge Garcia memorialized as a master teacher on math-teach [1], but then he's already gotten a few rewards. I bet you'll be getting some as well if you continue to champion quality education in the face of know-nothing schools. Kirby [1] http://mathforum.org/kb/thread.jspa?threadID=2864078 I'm really glad he recorded audio from his classroom, live, and put that on Youtube. Only a small percentage of teachers have the guts to do that. Great contribution! PS: remember to change the subject line and you don't have to quote the entire digest.