Convinced by Miracles
Fifth mondays in the month mean throwback blog posts and since Easter is fast approaching, here is our reminder from the great Blaise Pascal about why we follow Christ: Jesus Christ has verified that He was the Messiah, never in verifying His doctrine by Scripture and the prophecies, but always by His miracles. (Pascal, 808)
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Procedure Nuts & Bolts
Now that we’ve determined when procedures are necessary and how to not be entangled in the mindless following of said procedures. Let’s go ahead and review a few simple key steps to making a good procedure. First, when you are faced with a series of problems that appear to contain a hidden truth and consistency
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Developing Procedures from Beauty
I recently urged you to not lose beauty for the sake of mastering a procedure. I still hold to this, but I want to remind you not to fall off of the horse on the other side. Procedures are important. While it may be true that focusing solely on procedures reduces are children to computers,
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Displacement of Squares
The whole is the sum of its parts. This is a property that we learn and rely heavily upon in our study of Geometry, but we practice its usefulness in Algebra, especially when learning about polynomials. Most students of algebra can look at the figure on the left above and calculate the area of the
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Procedure vs. Beauty
Procedure. When we get bogged down in the weeds it’s often in the weeds of procedure, and it’s procedure that gets us out. We search longingly for the one magic step that will save us from the slough of despond. As though we simply missed a step and fell. Maybe we did. Yet maybe, it
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Whatever is Noble
I have the privilege of teaching at a classical Christian conservatory once a week, and one of my roles this year is to lead the morning song. I had come across the song “I Know That My Redeemer Lives”, and it has been a fun and edifying way to begin the day. It begins: “I
The Family Collective
Every once in a while I peruse past blog posts. Honestly, I think that the Lori of 2020 was probably smarter and had more to say than the Lori of 2025. Here’s the setting for you: I am at my desk after a great Algebra class trying to think about polynomials and what I can
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Post Graduation Cycle
I have been reminded recently that life is full of cycles. It’s cyclical, which from a mathematician’s standpoint, means it’s repetitive and predictable. I find myself less than thrilled to be embarking on college admissions and all of the expectations that come with graduation again. Just as I spend large portions of the summer reminding
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The Cycle of Seniors
Large families do everything together. They visit museums, go to parks, bike, hike, ski, everything. At some point though you find that the older children maybe don’t want to visit the same museum again, for they go every year. Like those dreaded Christmas movies that we watch in December out of some unspoken sense of
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Optimization
Ahhh! Optimization! The wonderful world of gathering a plethora of information, variables, realities, and patterns and using it to determine the best possible decision. In Algebra, students dip their toes in the beginnings of optimization with linear equations, but do they know that? Nope. Neither do they know the power they could yield. The reality