I updated the reviews page of the website. Talk about ways to make yourself feel good, spend some time reading and compiling quotes from people who like the project you've been working on.
I'm not so awesome at marketing myself, I think this project is really important and am happy to talk to anyone who asks me about it, but I don't often start the conversation. Recently we had a meeting with some middle school teachers and I talked to the middle school curriculum guy running the meeting about Nix afterward. Turns out he doesn't work specifically with the math teachers, but he was still interested. So interested he wrote the title on his hand in sharpie! (On purpose! I tried to stop him by telling him it was a permanent marker but he went ahead and did it anyway.) He also shared that he had asked some kids what division meant the other day and they started showing him how to divide. He stopped them and said, "No, what does it mean?" and they replied, "Hm, no one has ever asked that." I love that our non-math guy is asking students such thought provoking questions!
Finally, there have been some great stories of people nixing tricks lately. I decided to share those stories with everyone by adding another chapter to the book. It's obviously not chapter one but LaTeX auto-numbers and the only way I could get just this chapter into a pdf all on its own was to make a new document. I would really appreciate some feedback! What other questions did you have after reading the book? What would make a more convincing call to action? Are there typos? Equally important questions.
The conclusions chapter looks pretty good. You can fix the chapter numbering problem in 2 ways:
ReplyDeleteUse \setcounter{chapter}{15} before \begin{chapter} for Chapter 16. (see http://www.personal.ceu.hu/tex/counters.htm for example)
Break the document into separate files (say one per chapter) and use \includeonly to specify which chapters you want in a particular document.
I love all the options in LaTeX! I didn't take the time to research this issue since this post was the only place I'd want the single chapter but that's good to know.
DeleteParagraph right after the break on page 2 has a few typos:
ReplyDelete"hgih" should be "high" and "my" should be "me". Also, "then" should be "than".
Thanks. And thanks for sharing the book with your colleagues!
DeleteI really like this book, by the way. I've been trying to get other math teachers in my area to look it over and start really thinking about what "tricks" they use that obscure the mathematics.
ReplyDelete