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Wednesday, July 9, 2008

Associate With Me?

Eventually, I hope my math teaching website will include a comment section so I can get feed back from teachers on how they teach each topic. Unfortunately, that involves a much more dynamic type of website construction than I am currently employing. Luckily, I am helping a friend paint his house this week and he happens to do web design as a career so I should be able to pull it off eventually. For now, however, I am going to use this blog to get some feedback on different topics.

Todays topic is: Associative and Commutative Properties

I am interested in your thoughts on how you teach students about these properties. Obviously, the properties themselves are pretty simple to illustrate, but is it important to make students name the illustrations or is it more important for them to just understand the properties but not know their names?

1 comment:

Marie said...

This is a great site to give and take ideas. It seems a little simplistic but I always tell my students that the Associative Prop. is similar to hanging around with different friends. One day you "associate" with Joe and Bob tags along. Then you "associate" with Bob and Joe tags along. They remember the Commutative Prop. by thinking that the terms can "commute" or move.