Life, Learning, and Enlightenment

I often find myself working with clients for whom math is their most difficult subject. Usually, this is because the teacher isn’t reaching them due to differences between how most math is presented and how these students learn.

The educational service center in Southwest Georgia has compiled quite a collection of graphic organizers from the teachers in their service area and have posted them online for us all to benefit from.

Take a look at their Mathematics Page to see what might benefit you!

Some students have problems visualizing the application of Ohm’s Law and the equations for voltage, current, resistance, and power. If you work best with visuals, or if you’d just like a place to check your work*, take a look at the Ohm’s Law Calculators available at http://www.the12volt.com/ohm/page2.asp.

*The use of these tools to get homework and practice answers will not help make you smarter or promote understanding! Do your own work first!

Here’s a cool tool for checking that large number multiplication or division. Its a MS Excel spreadsheet set up to do either multiplication or division. I don’t, of course, advocate the use of this tool instead of working the problem yourself, but its a good way to check your work.

This MS Excel spreadsheet should work fine with open source alternatives that can open and edit .xls files, including OpenOffice.org and Gnumeric.

Just click on the screenshot below to download the spreadsheet in .zip format, ready to decompress and use!

I was searching for some help and additional information on factoring polynomials for a client last night and found three websites that I thought I would share.

ThinkQuest is a place where teachers and students can go to build their own information sources. I didn’t spend a lot of time learning about who they are and what they do, but one section of the site is called Math for Morons, and it has some really good info on the topic I was searching at http://library.thinkquest.org/20991/alg2/polyf.html.

I also found a cool source of FREE Mathematics tutorials and worksheets at http://www.analyzemath.com/.

Finally, the West Texas A&M Universtity has a Virtual Math Lab that contains some interesting and helpful information.

Please leave feedback via comment or the Question Form and let me know how these resources worked for you and your algebra issues.