Ohio Journal of School Mathematics | Issue: Issue: 1(98) Fall 2024 (2024)

Volume 98 • 2024 • Fall 2024

Most of this issue is an argument about Ohio. James Schultz traces a line from closed-circuit television and early calculators to the function-graphing tools that Bert Waits and Frank Demana built at Ohio State, and he claims that line ran out across the whole country. Three people who were there answer him. Gregory Foley expands the oral history and adds his own first meetings with the figures in it; Gail Burrill follows the handheld graphing tool from the 1980s to the TI-Nspire and asks what we lost and kept; Edward Laughbaum fills in the professional-development machinery, the Early Mathematics Placement Testing program and the short courses that reached thousands of teachers. Read together they are less a celebration than a record of how a few people in one state moved a field.

The rest of the issue is teachers at work. Todd Moyer hands high schoolers WebSketchpad and lets them experiment their way into hyperbolic geometry before they ever see a proof. Two pieces put mathematics next to civics: Blair Izard and Kristal Cloft bring the 2020 election into a 4th-grade lesson on estimation and rounding, and Satyam Mishra and Janet Walker have older students analyze real data as future voters. Ryan Griesmer and Gabriel Matney close with a study of six teacher candidates who practiced in a simulated classroom of student avatars, and report that the candidates grew more open to solutions they hadn’t expected.