Ohio Journal of School Mathematics | Issue: Issue: 1(96) Spring 2024 (2024)

Volume 96 • 2024 • Spring 2024

A good part of this issue is about the scaffolding around the math classroom rather than the math on the board. Nirode and Boyd surveyed Ohio high schools and found nearly 70% of math teachers tracked, with senior teachers and newer ones landing in very different courses, and they hand departments a set of questions to ask about how those assignments get made. O’Mellan, Kosko, Pachnowski, Matney, and Driskell take up House Bill 33 and what it would mean to fold Ohio’s separate early and middle grade licenses back into one PreK–8 band, drawing on preservice teachers’ own worries about losing that focus. Crawford writes about restorative circles in elementary math, and Lower and Whitehead describe a short online intervention, Mental Math, that treats the math class as a place to build coping skills rather than just compute.

The rest is mathematics for its own sake, taught carefully. Kaufman argues that we should stop telling students division by zero is “undefined” and call it inconsistent instead, since it produces equations no more valid than any other false statement. Biswas and Sinha pick up Kempner’s old result and chase what happens to the harmonic series when you throw out terms whose digits you don’t like, and the leftover still converges. Hogue and Reade had 113 sixth graders measure the area of their own hands, which turns an irregular shape into a real measurement problem, and Otten, Otten, Baah, and Stewart model atmospheric carbon with a line for the long slow climb and exponential and trigonometric pieces for the modern trend and its seasonal swing.