Continuous Everywhere but Differentiable Nowhere

So I didn’t *win* Monday Math Madness. For those of you not in the know, the blog WildAboutMath is having a rotating math problem contest with another website, and I put my hat in the ring. And I got the answer right. Sadly, the random number generator did not love me (click link for a [...]

It’s 10:45pm and I just came across this compelling article called “The Mathematician’s Lament” that I’ve now read half of. I’m going to finish it off when I have more time, and post my reaction to it. From what I’ve gleaned thus far, this article is incredible provocative. I can’t say I wholly agree with [...]

Some good finds I’ve been saving up. Click below for a hodgepodge.

Trigonometry is one of those topics that if you get the basics, the rest of it will make a heck of a lot of sense. But if you miss it, you’re going to be trying frantically to come up with ad hoc ways to understand each new concept.[1]
I have been teaching the beginning of trig, [...]

I got roped into chaperoning a school dance.
Okay, you caught me. I was hoping for the opportunity since I started teaching. Why? I want to act as sociologist, studying the behavior of my students in a setting as much outside of the educational context as I’m going to see them. (Yeah, being in NYC, I [...]

Last week, I proctored the American Mathematics Competition (AMC10/12). Three students in mathclub showed up to take it, along with 4 other students.
When I was a student in high school, I loved these tests. Not only did the 25-question-test set my brain on fire, but the problems were actually do-able. I loved math competitions [...]

This post on the site “stuff white people like” is just so dead on that it’s hilarious. Not the whole “white people” part of it (I’m not white), but everything else. One of the best quotations:
At this point, they can feel superior to graduate school and say things like “A PhD is a testament to perseverance, [...]

Recently in calculus, we’ve been working hard on u-substitution to solve integrals. Integrals are not intuitive. They are motivated (area under the curve), they are justified (the anti-derivative), and we try to play around with them until we “get them.” But when it comes down to it, you can’t really capitalize on much intuition when [...]

Yesterday I watched “King of Kong,” and a while ago I fell in love with “Spellbound.” Both of those movies are documentaries about strange subcultures of people — where the norms and values of these subjects are so foreign to the viewer that it’s a bit of an anthropological expedition.
While watching “King of Kong” I [...]

Dan Meyer asks the question:
Unless my experience as a classroom manager is several deviations below the mean, other people are struggling with this as I have struggled. New teachers are struggling with this. So why is classroom management the farthest topic from anyone’s blog?
Before reading the comments, to see what his other readers thought, [...]