Things that make me say...Hmmm! Math 1510 Post #2

I've decided to take a new theme on for my blog...at least for this week anyway.  I'm coming across more and more things that I haven't ever heard of as we continue our journey through the textbook.  I think it's important to point these things out because if I haven't heard of these concepts, perhaps you haven't either!  There were so many concepts in the last two weeks that were completely new to me.  For example, I successfully completed pre-calculus without a taste of the Euclidean Algorithm.

At first, I ignored the tool and played with the numbers on my calculator.  I let it pass by in hopes of never seeing that God forsaken algorithm again.  Quite frankly, I was afraid of it.  That was until I needed to find the greatest common factor of said large number, 432.  I thought, "Well, I could play with my calculator, or I could look at that stupid very helpful algorithm."  I cracked open the book and checked it out.  Here is a video on how to use this crafty method to find the greatest common factor of 123.



I hope you found that helpful! It was clear as mud until I watched the video.  I think some of these methods would be used more often if they were explained to our students better!  I'm not a fan of formulas--because my math teachers shoved them down my made me memorize them and never showed me how to apply them!  Let's show our students how to apply these formulas so that they can have more time to do other things...like play outside in this beautiful weather!