Articles
Guides and resources about math education.
Getting Unstuck: What to Do When You Don't Know How to Start
Staring at a problem is not a strategy, but it has a replacement: a fifteen-minute protocol with the clock running. Copy it, describe the finish line, try the smallest case, draw or tabulate, take one backwards step, and write down exactly where you stopped — with one rectangle problem worked all the way through to show it.
Math in Elections: Polls, Percentages, and Seats
Party Y wins 170 votes to 130 and loses the election 2 seats to 1. How three districts of 100 voters each turn a popular-vote loser into a seat winner, how five seats get divided among four parties by the largest remainder method, and why a poll measures votes while seats are a second calculation on top.
Math in Architecture and Construction: Measure Twice, Cut Once
A two-by-four is 1.5 inches by 3.5 inches, not 2 by 4 — you are getting 65% of the wood the label promised, and the missing third is nobody's mistake. Why the name stopped being true a century ago, why four boards flat make 14 inches where the drawing says 16, and how a quarter inch per foot of slope is the one error you will never see with your eyes.
Math in Gardening: Area, Spacing, and Yields
Two identical beds, the same seed packet, the same spacing — one gave 128 lettuce plants and the other gave 148. Why offsetting every other row by half the spacing fits 15% more, where the square root of three comes from, why a bed is four feet wide, and why depth is a cubic number.
Math in Space: Light-Years, Rockets, and Gravity
Reaching orbit needs about twenty kilos of fuel for every kilo you want to keep, and the reason is a logarithm. Why gravity falls off with distance squared, why ten times the propellant only doubles the speed change, and why a light-year is a distance wearing a time unit's name.
Math in Medicine: Dosages, Percentiles, and Growth
The dosage rule almost everyone learns is the one that fails. Why scaling a dose by body weight is a proportion when the real rule scales by surface area, why that turns the error into a power of two-thirds, and why a 60th percentile does not mean sixty percent of anything.