Tripping Over Words
As a parent of two children making their way through math education, I have the privilege to talk with them about learning on a regular basis. Sometimes it's at the dinner table when I throw them a neat question to think about and sometimes it's in the car driving to hockey/baseball/guides/whatever. Talking about education with my kids is one of my favourite things to do and they really seem to enjoy it too. The other evening, my daughter Megan took out a worksheet that she had been working on in her grade 6 class. The students' task was to identify lines in 2-D shapes that were either parallel or perpendicular and they were to sort these shapes based on their geometric properties. I'd imagine this type of activity is fairly common in Ontario as these sorts of comparing and sorting activities are written as part of our grades 1-8 mathematics curriculum. While talking to Megan about her school work, I noticed her notation on figure G indicating that the lines we