Posts

$3 A Gram

Joint Made From Marijuana.  Image by Raihan Rana, retrieved from Wikimedia Commons on 12 May 2018, under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International License.
By Clarence Thompson

The last two posts presented a simple example of the usefulness of numeracy in managing one's resou…

May 1, 2018: The Commutative Property and Multiple-Digit Multiplication

The last two weeks have been quite productive.  We now have four families who come on a fairly regular basis, and at times we have had nine kids at our weekly teaching sessions.  Most of the kids are between nine and twelve years old, but we do also have a six year old girl and a five year old boy…

Knowing Numbers ≠ Getting Fleeced

By Clarence Thompson

We who are part of the Flying University Project have been very busy this past week.  It looks like at least two teaching venues will be opening up in East Portland this month, and a new teacher has joined us.  As a result, I don't have a lot of time to write a lengthy pos…

The Agony and Reward of Automaticity

By Clarence Thompson

The process of our teaching has uncovered a few challenging tasks. Such tasks usually involve enduring some unavoidable pain and suffering on the way to a valuable goal. When people know why they need to go through the suffering, it becomes more bearable, and this knowledge m…

Designing Communities of Learning - Our Welcome Packet

By Clarence Thompson
As part of our toolkit for motivating our students to math excellence, we created a Welcome Packet.  That packet contains the following elements: a couple of pictures of kids who look like the kids we are trying to reach, a description of the Flying University Project, a Famil…