What? Really?
You can’t get a more dense set of math words crammed into a small space than “scalar factors of scalar ratios” – shoot me.
@Milehimama, a friend of mine on Twitter and fearless leader of the Houston Blogging Chicks asked me yesterday what was up with this strange math thing. And why her son was being asked to do a table with them instead of doing it the way it seemed most natural to him.
I could go on and on – not just about the boring-ness of the table, but also the coolness of scalar factors. I’ll spare you (and her) the insane rant/passionate pep rally. I’ve limited my answer to 6 minutes in the video below.
What I left out was that this works when you’re playing with matrices, polynomials and even the distributive property. Scalar factors are also why things like reducing a fraction works!
Ready to scale your world? Share with us what you used at home and in the classroom by leaving a comment below!
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Great way to bring the visuals home with items in the kitchen, Bon. Interesting use of scalar ratios/factors vs. proportions. Terminology matters. Thanks for readers/viewers to try something new like an odd shaped object and items that are real to them to make the connection. That connection surely will help them make more sense of the math strategies they are learning.
Terminology is both the essence and the bane of math learning. It can make or break things – and really understanding them from a “normal English” point of view hits it home.
Thanks for the comment, Toni!