I love how creative I am with my blog titles. Meh. I realized I “favorite” tweets on twitter a lot when I want to save them for later, because they are awesome. But as I was looking through them recently, I was like: I should put some of these in a blogpost for others. And so one day if I’m looking for something, I can actually find it by searching my blog (something I do way too often) instead of scrolling forever on twitter.

@rawrdimus shared this applet he made on Desmos for helping kids to understand the idea of a derivative as “slope-iness.” What I like about it is (a) you only get a small line segment instead of the whole tangent line (the whole line would be distracting), and (b) that kids can drag the slider for a and get a sense for what’s happening and how that relates to what’s being plotted, and (c) that kids can then make a prediction where the next point will be (and then drag the slider to see if their thinking was correct.

Related to this is something many people worked on earlier this year based on a tweet I wrote (I wanted a surfer or skier to be travelling on a curve, and the surfboard/ski to be the tangent line)… an updated version of this was posted by @lustomatical…

My friend @pispeak posted a nice calculus puzzle that I enjoyed thinking through and solving: “Found this cool question below online (for a challenge) but got stuck…thoughts? help? @samjshah @calcdave @stoodle #mtbos “The line y=0 is tangent to both x^2 and x^3. But there exists another line tangent to both curves. What is the equation of that line?””

I don’t know this teacher, but I like the idea of doing this. Maybe next year I can make it a goal to do write one positive note to each student. Something heartfelt and genuine. A student met with me before school to talk about a “math exploration” she was going to do, and I loved how into her idea she was. I can totally write so many notes saying good things like that to my kids. Like this teacher, doing stuff like this will make me feel good.

@mikeandallie retweeted a link to a page that explains the unsolvability of the quintic without needing all that abstract algebra. I forgot to dig into this page. But OMG it looks like it’s going to be aweeeeeesome.

@bowmanimal wrote a freaking amazing blogpost about something he did in stats class before winter break. I still am reeling with how awesome it was. The question: “How can we use basic statistics to examine and tell apart writing styles? What do statistics about your own writing say about your style?”  Doesn’t get you excited? Trust me, click on the link and read how he does this. I don’t often come across lessons that I’m desperate to teach, but this is one of them. It also clearly comes from a master curriculum designer.

@dandersod wrote a blogpost ages ago about how to turn a graph into a 3D printed object. I desperately loved it, and had our tech integrator teach me how to do this on our school’s 3D printer.

I wanted to have my precalc kids make mathematical ornaments based on beautiful polar or parametric graphs they tinker around with/discover (maybe have a christMATH tree? haha sorry)… but the timing wasn’t right this year for ornaments (we do polar in the spring). But I still want to make this a reality this year. I hope I remember!!!

@fermatslibrary tweeted out this picture:

I love it because I remember doing something two years ago with my geometry class, arguing that we don’t need cosine and tangent, and that having sine is enough. We showed that we could have done all of trig with just sine. But then we talked about why having cosine and tangent in the mix makes our lives easier. I love this chart because it clearly illustrates what life would be like if we didn’t have multiple trig functions. (On a side note, I wonder what kids would notice and wonder about this chart if they hadn’t ever seen or heard of trig before. Like a middle school kid or a late elementary school kid.)

@mzbat (don’t know who this is) wrote a riff on my fav Carly Rae Jepsen, which I feel often enough:

hey i just met you
and this is crazy
but could this meeting
be an email maybe