MathMentor's blog

Taylor Mali slams it to those who look down on teachers. Old, but I just came across it -- ignites, inspires and justifies. I love it! I can't imagine the message delivered much better than this in only 3 minutes.

Have a look at this video of the comparative sizes of various stellar bodies. We're amazingly small!

Judging from the comments from the article Teacher Pay Scale Across Canada, many people covet the schedule of a teacher and believe that they are paid too richly for simply reading textbooks. I think that teachers are not paid enough!

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There once was a fantastic television show called MacGuyver, which followed the adventures of the most exceptional problem solver you can think of. The show was not about characters or drama or action, although each episode had little bits of each. The show was about heaving MacGuyver ever-more-difficult problems to solve with ever-fewer resources.

Here's a tough problem: Suppose you are the publisher of a paper and you want to get an estimate of the quality. In particular, you want to estimate how many unfound grammar and spelling errors remain in a paper after it has passed through your editing staff. How, you might ask, could we possibly know how many errors haven't been found if we never find them? That sounds so obviously impossible that it's stupid to ask! Right?

Wrong!

I remember in the good old days cheating meant a few things:  On a test, you cheated by taking in an answer sheet or crib sheet, and on a paper it meant that you copied something.  Nowadays I imagine that the assignments I used to get could not be given because information is so freely and easily available electronically.  It is just a matter of copying and pasting huge sections of essay or paper.

I was flipping through Games magazine this month and noticed a page of Hexa-Trex puzzles!  I'm happy that a publication picked up your puzzle and I hope others find it as fun as I do.

PS Why didn't you let us know that you were in a magazine?