algebra

A couple of 8th graders I tutor showed me a quiz they had done poorly on. I ran into a problem that bothered me. There wasn't technically anything wrong with it, I think. But I could see why it would trip up students. Instructions were to solve for x. It was, roughly, 5x + 2 = 5x + 2. Use...

As a side job, I am a professional tutor. I have a student that struggled through his last year in Pre-Algebra, and ultimately failed the final, despite all the work I did to prepare him. So, next year, they are going to put him in Pre-Algebra again. His mother and I have agreed to spend this...

As usual, students have trouble learning something? Remove the requirement that they learn it. Or, at least try! We have already eliminated geography, elementary school history, spelling, grammar, foreign languages, art, music, even penmanship for heavens's sake. I don't know what else...

I wasn't sure whether this should go here or in the Science, Mathematics, & Technology section, since hardly anyone ever visits this section, but I suppose it's relevant. To explain my situation, I may once again be in a position to tutor another student in Algebra. Long story short, he needs...

Okay, I'm teaching math for elementary school teachers. The text is explaining how to solve for :) in a ratio such as: :)/24 = 8/16. (I'm not using x, because it looks just like a multiplication sign.) According to the text, one must cross-multiply; that is, multiply the left numerator by the...

I am trying to decipher the "pre-algebra / algebra I / algebra II" system, and am having trouble figuring out what the differences between each of the steps are (what new information is taught in each step). Could anyone point me to a decent source or explain this for me?

There is a somewhat widely circulated column out by Richard Cohen on the L.A. school district's requirement for students to have a year of algebra and a year of geometry. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/blog/2006/02/15/BL2006021501989.html Cohen discusses the story of Gabriela...

I recently read a scientist mentioning that within 50 years or so, it will be pretty cheap to figure out the entire genome of any living entity. He went on to say, that this would mean, we could take any two animals, extract their genomes, and calculate how long ago they had a common ancestor...

1. Can you have a dot product for two matrices that are NOT vectors and NOT identical dimensions? Everything I've seen suggests that only vector matrices with exactly the same dimensions can be used in a dot product. If thats not true, how would find the dot product of [1, 2; 3, 4] with [5...