Ohio Journal of School Mathematics | Issue: Issue: 1(78) Spring 2018 (2018)

Volume 78 • 2018 • Spring 2018

A lot of this issue is about the work that happens before a student writes down an answer, and how rarely it gets credit. Tom Romano’s essay on grading student multiplication argues that we read for the final number and miss the thinking that produced it. Awsaf Abdulla Alwarsh looks at the discussions that surface that thinking in a problem-solving classroom, and Christy Danko Graybeal and Tricia K. Strickland weigh mnemonics like KISS against the understanding they sometimes replace. Jim Ewing makes a related point about planning: he would rather teachers build a lesson with English language learners in mind from the start than retrofit one designed for everyone else.

The rest of the issue is interested in making mathematics visible. Wasim Akram Mandal and Greg Orosi each contribute a proof without words, one for squares of sums and one for the sum of the first n integers squared, where the picture does the arguing. Elisabeth Johnston and Elizabeth Kennedy Ward turn Piet Mondrian’s paintings into a game for area and perimeter. And in a creative-nonfiction essay, my coauthors and I spend a morning in a remedial algebra room, watching good questions and classroom-management software pull in opposite directions.