Ohio Journal of School Mathematics | Issue: Issue: 1(84) Spring 2020 (2020)

Volume 84 • 2020 • Spring 2020

Much of this issue is teachers going back to a lesson they already taught and rebuilding it. Hannah Dietz reworks her “Taco Cart” Three Act Task, and Caroline Schulte revises a 7th-grade lesson so students discover the Pythagorean Theorem with patty paper and GeoGebra rather than being handed it. Jackie McCarthy rebuilt a quadratics-station activity after watching where her students went wrong, and Lisa Jacob came out of a two-day special-right-triangle lesson convinced that less is more. Kristyn Walters keeps it concrete, having sixth graders find that it takes about π radius squares to cover a circle.

The rest of the issue ranges wider. Brooke Norval and Martha Castaneda close their three-part ELL series with specific ways to reword test items so the math, not the language, is what gets tested. Valerie Long and Brian Sharp had twenty-two middle schoolers learn matrices through how John McCain and other prisoners of war tapped messages to each other in captivity. Victor Oxman and Moshe Stupel offer a proof without words showing the diagonal of a parallelogram cut into three equal parts, and I’ve included a short piece on “indelible math moments,” a writing activity I use to get students telling each other about the math they can’t forget.