About/Contact

Thank you for visiting my blog, and I wish you the best of God’s blessings. Life is an adventure, teaching even more so. And teaching math may be the coolest adventure of them all!

About Denise

As a homeschool mom [explore my Blogging 2 Learn blog] who loves math, I want to help other homeschoolers see the variety and richness of the subject. Math is not just rules and rote memory. Math is like ice cream, with more flavors than you can imagine — and if all your children ever do is textbook math, that’s like feeding them broccoli-flavored ice cream.

Of course, our students do need to learn textbook math, just as piano players do need to practice scales and football players to do push-ups, but they should never be led to think that routine operations are the point of mathematics.

I hope this blog will be a place where we can play around with ideas about learning, teaching, and understanding math. (For me, it usually happens in that order.) And if we can find a way to give our children a good taste of that “Aha!” feeling, the thrill of working through a challenging problem and figuring it out, then we won’t be able to keep them away from math.

Who am I? I am a Christian, a wife and homemaker, and the homeschooling mother of five, ages 11yo to adult, all still living at home (though not for much longer, alas!) four of whom still live at home (or at least keep the majority of their worldly possessions here) in the rural countryside of central Illinois.

My hobbies are learning and teaching math, presenting math workshops for homeschool groups, and reading anything I can get my hands on. I have taught or tutored mathematics at every level from pre-K to undergraduate physics — which, at least in the recitation class that I TA’d, was just one story problem after another. What fun!

(If you know me from homeschooling forums, you might recognize the critter I used to have as an avatar. This is a sugar glider eating a yogurt chip. They were my teenage daughter’s pets, but she had to sell them when she got too busy with college commitments.)

Write to Me

If you have questions about homeschooling or teaching math — if there’s anything about math that stumps you, or has never made sense, or you’re simply curious about — or if you’d like to plan a math workshop for your homeschool group, please e-mail me. I’m looking forward to hearing from you!

E-mail address:
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WordPress.com Contact Form

If you do not wish to send me an e-mail directly, you may contact me through WordPress using this form. It’s easy — simply type your message and click “Submit.” And I promise neither WordPress.com nor I will send you any spam!

Copyright Notice

Everything on this website, like nearly everything else on the Internet, is copyrighted material. It is illegal (and terribly rude) to take what another blogger or website author has written and pass it off as your own creation. I hope that you enjoy my tips and math games, use them in your classroom or homeschool, mention them to friends, link to them as much as you want — but please respect my copyrights, as you would expect me to respect yours.

As one of the founding fathers of mathematics is reported to have said:

I will be sufficiently rewarded if when telling it to others you will not claim the discovery as your own, but will say it was mine.

— Thales of Miletus (CA 600 BC)

If you are unsure how copyright law might affect your blogging or other Internet actions, here is a good (non-lawyerly) summary:

• Copyright Law: 12 Dos and Don’ts

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