Welcome to our math history for teachers course!

  Hello everyone, and welcome to this very interesting and exciting course. We will be exploring aspects of the history of mathematics from a wide range of eras and cultures, through problem-solving, working with mathematics in historical ways, and through connections with our current BC curriculum and the arts.  

It is truly amazing and eye-opening to learn about the ways that our ancestors and people of every culture and historical have worked with sophisticated concepts of number, shape, and patterned relationships. We will explore many of the roots of ideas we teach in school and tend to take for granted nowadays -- and I hope this will just be the beginning of your ongoing interest and understanding of the history of mathematics and the sciences.

Here is a link to our course outline (which may be revised as we go along). Happy historical learning!

** Note that blog posts will be assigned a mark from zero to 3 each week:  3: extraordinarily thoughtful & insightful  2: very good, showing understanding, engagement and thought  1: adequate, showing that the reading has been completed although the response is not strong.  0: assignment is not complete/ reading has not been completed.  Most of your blog posts will get a mark of 2, and if you have all 2's, you will receive full marks for your blog! A mark of 3 is just to let you know that you did an exceptionally impressive piece of writing and thinking from our points of view, and a 3 counts as full marks as well.

If you receive a 0, 1 or 1.5, you will need to write or revise that blog post before the next marking date (in about a month) or by the end of the course. The comments you receive should let you know what needs to be added or revised. Please don't delete the original post, but add an **EDIT to let us know what you have added that is new! Most of your smaller blog posts and responses will be assigned from September to early November -- after that, you can concentrate more fully on your culminating assignments.

Cardano's anomalous version of the 'planetary' magic squares