High School
Mathematics Links
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This page contains links to pages and resources that may be
of interest to teachers, students, and parents.
This certificate is offered by Saint Mary's University for high school teachers, and junior high
school teachers, who wish to improve their mathematical background. It
is approved for teaching licence upgrading in Nova Scotia by the
Minister's Advisory Committee on Teacher Certification.
These documents list some errors in the high school textbooks used in New Brunswick, Newfoundland, and Nova Scotia, and
comment on related issues. They are in Adobe PDF format; if you do not have the reader for PDF files already, you
can download it here.
This booklet, published by APICS, is intended for high school students intending to study science
in university, who want to know what mathematics (algebra and trigonometry) they will need to do
well in the first year calculus course that is required in many science programs. It can be
downloaded free of charge.
This web page at UNB contains various links, including the errata documents for the Mathematical
Modeling and Constructing Mathematics series. There is also a small collection of
short resource notes on topics such as boxplots, normal distributions, and tree diagrams for finding
probabilities.
This integration technique was published by L. S. Grinstein in the 1971 volume of the College Math Journal, and may well have been known long before that. It is easy, transparent, and illustrates the Fundamental Theorem of Calculus. However, it never caught on, and is now something of a "lost art".
I rediscovered the technique in 2007. When I tried to submit it for publication, the referee pointed out Grinstein's earlier article, and claimed, correctly, that I had added little to what was there. However, the original article, going back to the days before the CMJ was widely read, is unfortunately obscure. In the hope that integration by undetermined coefficients will not remain "lost", I am putting my own article (for which, under the circumstances, I can claim little novelty) onto the Web.
Take the following quick test - which of these do you agree with?
- Taking the standard deviation of 25 numbers by hand is good for the character.
- None of my students ever make keypunching errors.
- If axes without scales are good enough for the TI-83, they're good enough for my students.
- Nobody would ever want to cut and paste their plots from the Graphing Technology into a report.
- If technicolor 3D ribbon charts weren't informative, Enron, Nortel, and Bre-X wouldn't have used them.
- Boxplots? Why would I want boxplots?
Scoring: If you agreed with the first two items, you probably don't want to use any technology at all, except a slide rule (to draw straight lines along the edge of.) If you answered "yes" to the second two items, you will get by just fine with graphing calculators all round. And if you agreed with the last two items, the spreadsheet on your classroom computer will suit your style nicely. But if you think you'd like easy data management, lots of features appropriate for scientific work, and plots your students can paste into their word processor documents, you should consider encouraging them to use a statistical package for some purposes. Some of these cost thousands of dollars per user... here are a few that don't.
Drexel University runs a net newsletter on mathematical education. You can read the latest issue, or subscribe, here. Like this page, it's mostly links, which makes it a very efficient source of information. Just download what you want!
This is my personal selection of a few recreational math pages. Some of them are themselves
collections of links. If you have a deadline coming up, click at your peril...
Find out about our Annual High School Programming Competition. Teams of programmers
compete to write working programs faster than the opponents!
This page is a list of books, mostly about math, that I've enjoyed and that
I think might be of interest to beginning mathematicians or computer scientists,
or those with an interest in those subjects.
Versions of these two esays originally appeared as editorials in the Canadian Mathematical Society's Notes.
Both refer to John Mighton's book The Myth of Ability; Nurturing Mathematical Talent in Every Child and his JUMP program.
While a paper subscription to the CMS Notes (the ``news and views'' journal of the Canadian Mathematical Society) costs $50/yr, you can get it free online. There is a regular education column, book reviews, information about events such as the May 2003 CMS School Mathematics Forum, and other interesting material. Back numbers since 1998 are available online too.
This online journal has lots of articles about teaching statistics, mostly at the introductory level. There is stress on the use of technology (the stress tends to be on computers rather than graphing calculators, reflecting current statistical practice.) Many articles come with data sets that can be used in the classroom.
are a sort of mental-calculation exercise popularized by the great physicist Enrico Fermi. The idea is to estimate something to within an order of magnitude, without heavy use of reference materials or computing technology. An example:
"Is it likely that somewhere in Nova Scotia there is a member
of the clergy who was issued with a license plate bearing
the "Number of the Beast", 666, as its three-digit numerical part?
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You may assume that such plates are, in fact, issued at random like other plates.
One answer:
This page contains links to many collections of Fermi problems, and seems to be a useful resource.
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