Ohio Journal of School Mathematics | Issue: Issue: 1(97) Summer 2024 (2024)

Volume 97 • 2024 • Summer 2024

Several of these papers do the same quiet thing: they trade one representation for another so a hard problem turns into a familiar one. Prins, Casey, and Hutson factor stubborn nonmonic quadratics by substituting until the expression looks like something students already know how to handle. Gechlik and Sedrakyan reach past the usual school toolkit, where you chop an irregular shape into pieces and add, and bring in Gauss’s shoelace formula for the cases where chopping fails. Wheeler, Barrera, and Cooley hand fifth and sixth graders Python and ask them to draw and justify figures in the first quadrant, so the geometry shows up as code.

The other half of the issue is about preparing the people who teach this. Chatraw and Soto write from inside a mentor-supervised clinical placement about the gap between what you learn in coursework and what happens in a real room, and how to recover when a lesson goes sideways. Griesmer, Livers, and Roberts watch teacher candidates work a modeling task and sort their solutions into a handful of approaches. And Schultz tells the behind-the-scenes story of Arnold Ross, F. Joe Crosswhite, and the Ohio State people whose work on access and technology reached well past Ohio.