Made4Math Monday: Posters!

I have put together a group of posters to get printed, so I thought I’d share the ones I have made. Most of these PDFs are set to print out 11×17.

I actually found this quote on schoolfailblog.org, but I wanted it formatted landscape instead of portrait:

In honor of Max’s great presentation at TMC13 (and @druinok’s favorite font), I made:

If you want to get lost in great mathematically-related quotes, check out Furman University Mathematical Quotations Server. Some of the good ones I’ve found:

and

I get very tired of students who want to exert the least amount of effort possible. It occurred to me that just about any time a student asked me “Can I just …”, the student wanted to take an easy way out. Thus:

Made4Math Teacher Ruler Caddy

It’s almost Tuesday, but I made it!

Since I teach Geometry, I often need my big compass and ruler up at the board with me. The most inconvenient thing about this is finding somewhere to put the ruler while I use the compass and vice versa. My old room had a counter near the board that I usually used. My new room, however, has nothing nearby. I happened to remember the M4M post about making ruler caddies out of Pringles cans, and I remembered that I had a spare 2′ length of PVC pipe that I had planned to use to make an arrow caddy — thus was born the board ruler and compass caddy.

I picked up some hardware and spray paint:

I actually drew the perpendicular bisector of a chord on the circle to find a diameter and then marked the center of the base:

Next, I used L-brackets to attach the PVC coupler to the base:

I attached the pipe to the coupler:

I spray-painted the coupler and the base a gloss black. I had planned to use some black wrapping paper on the pipe, but it was too flimsy to stand up to the adhesive and clear finish. Instead, I used some cool-looking fabric from my stash, which I attached with spray adhesive. Once everything dries, I’ll finish off the top with some black duct tape, but here’s the mostly-finished product:

Made4Math #10

Sometimes it’s nice when necessity kicks us in the rear and makes us come up with different ways to do things.

I have always dreaded the “Points, Lines, and Planes” section of Geometry because it’s so text- and definition-heavy. (Reference this post for my original format.) Because the district has switched things up on us, PL&P is not the first section, and I need to teach it on the same day as their first quiz. I quickly decided to make this into a holey-notes foldable, but what format to use? It’s too much text for a 2-page booklet and not really enough text for a 4-page booklet. That size usually lends itself to a tabbed booklet, but how to arrange it?

My good scanner is up at school, but here is the result:

In all three classes, we got almost all the way through, and it was a lot less mind-numbing than it has been in years past.

Made for Math #7

At a recent training I attended, I found out that UTA (University of Texas at Arlington, our local university) had a print shop in the basement of the library for students and staff. The woman leading the training thought that teachers could get things printed as well (which turned out not to be the case). Since I am a part-time lecturer there, however, I could get stuff printed.

Since I have started teaching seniors, I have seen quite a few have issues with senioritis, so I wanted a humorous way to address this. Here is my masterpiece! Isn’t it purty? 🙂

View this document on Scribd

(I’m a little nervous using a copyrighted picture for this, but I believe I am safely in the “fair-use” side of things.)

Because I hit the print shop at the end of the summer session, they said they wouldn’t be able to print my poster until August 20th. I may go back then to get a big copy, but I was too impatient to wait. In the meantime, I could print an 11×17 copy myself, which is what I did. I also printed out one of the posters I found from here:

Made 4 Math Monday #6

I have a post, and it’s still Monday!!

One of my major summer projects is to transfer all of my scribbled re-take questions to computer.

Before:

After:

All nicely filed away:

I really need to work on Geometry next (that stack is almost as big), but I’m not looking forward to drawing all of the diagrams in Word. I also can’t print them out until I know from my department what the calendar is supposed to look like for this year.