Activities, Writings, and Videos by Debra K. Borkovitz
Three years ago I wrote a post about my transition to Boston University when I joined the Math/Stats department after Wheelock College, where I’d taught for 25 years, merged with BU. That post focused especially on the assessment system in … Read More
I have never rehearsed the first five minutes of class as many times as I did last summer. Wheelock College, where I’d taught for twenty-five years, had just merged with Boston University. At Wheelock I led the math program and … Read More
Note: Spoiler free, and you don’t have to have watched the series to read the post. I just finished watching Last Chance U, a new documentary series screening on Netflix, which follows the 2015 football season of the East Mississippi … Read More
Last week I read an excerpt in the Boston Globe from the blog post, “How to Improve Boston Public Schools,” by Nicholas C. Donohue, president of the Nellie Mae Educational foundation. The post focused on four items – increasing expectations, … Read More
The video below is my entry into the MTT2 contest, where people are making commentary videos on videos from the Khan Academy (KA). This contest began when John Golden and David Coffey posted their “Mystery Teacher Theater 2000” video, where … Read More
The Farey Sequence, \(F_{n}\) is the list of all simplified fractions between \(\dfrac{0}{1}\) and \(\dfrac{1}{1}\) with denominator less than or equal to \(n\). For example, \( \large F_{5}=\dfrac{0}{1},\dfrac{1}{5},\dfrac{1}{4},\dfrac{1}{3},\dfrac{2}{5},\dfrac{1}{2},\dfrac{3}{5},\dfrac{2}{3},\dfrac{3}{4},\dfrac{4}{5},\dfrac{1}{1}\)
It’s hard to make sense of multiplication and division of fractions. Before fractions, multiplication can almost always be seen as repeated addition, and the answer is never smaller than both the numbers you started with. Division is usually … Read More
This applet is a pick a number game, where the secret number is a fraction between 0 and 1. Enter a numerator and denominator and the computer will tell you if your fraction is too high or too low, until … Read More
In my post Trigonometry Yoga, I discussed how defining sine and cosine as lengths of segments in a unit circle helps develop intuition for these functions. I learned the circle definitions of sine and cosine in my junior year of … Read More