So you have a blog; TUMBLR works great for you or blogger is the best thing since a spiral notebook. So, how do you proceed writing a math blog? How do you get those coveted perfect scores on your math blog?
When the year starts, your blog is a response to something posted by the teacher. You might have to look up something specific online or watch a video. Your comments need to be something about the mathematics involved and not just, "I liked the sound of Steve Inskeep's voice," or "google had 9,832,568 different search results, so it must be important." So how do you think about the mathematics being presented here or explored? This blog is to help you ask yourself questions so you can delve more deeply and more meaningfully into the mathematics of the blog. You have thirty minutes to work on the blog -- you have time to develop something thoughtful here.
"The 5 Why's" might help you keep digging to a depth that's 5 times as deep. (You can also substitute "how" if that seems to fit more into what you are digging into.) So if you feel like writing, "It was interesting," then ask yourself, "WHY?" You might then say, "Because it applied to the real world." Then ask yourself, "HOW?" and so forth, until you've asked and answered 5 questions. Your goal is to keep digging until you get some real meat in your essay and not just "It was nice."
Another method is to ask yourself how this relates to the current or recent topic in math. How is this blog relevant? More often than not, the blog that I write for you to respond to is somehow linked to the topic in class. For example, you will be asked to write about the grade of a road and its relationship to a trig function, or for a different topic you'll be asked to watch a video about something in the real world. You could ask yourself, "Why would Ms Peach think this is relevant to what we've been studying?" Try to second guess me -- I know you try to do that all the time anyway, just take the same idea into the math realm.
As the year progresses, you'll likely be developing your own blog ideas. In January, previous students have said and asked, "Hey, Ms Peach, I found this really cool thing called Taxi-Cab Geometry, Can I do a blog on that?" or "Hey Ms M, What if you put that triangle on a sphere, what would happen?" or "My uncle is an engineer and he says he uses trig. Can I find out what he does and write about that?" I've said YES to each of those, even though they were very different from the prompt that I wrote. While I'll always be giving you some kind of prompts in case you have writer's block and need a jump start, you DO have freedom to choose your own topics. They do, however, need to have a connection to mathematics.
I hope this helps some of you. If you read this and have comments or suggestions for your classmates, please add them here on my blog on the comment page.
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