Hi, I’m April Soo
Teaching and learning are two things in life I believe are worth doing well. I believe that learning is a lifelong process and that education changes lives. In this space you’ll find my musings on life, learning, and the pursuit of good teaching.
I’m Chinese, born Canadian; egregiously left-brained; and unapologetically bad at mental math for someone who teaches math. My adventures living and working abroad have taken me to Kazakhstan, Korea, China and Qatar. I currently live in Bangkok Thailand, where I teach high schoolers by day, and am in bed no later than 9 pm by night (life is glamorous when you recognize the sanctity of sleep). If that all sounds acceptable to you, I invite you to read on.
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From the Blog
Solving Quadratic Equations
This is a follow up to a previous post, Intercepts, The Zero Product Property, and Other Such Mathematical Disasters in which I wrote about some common misconceptions I was seeing in my students’ work while I was grading a mid-unit quiz. I wanted to dive deep into what the root of the problem was, and…
Keep readingIntercepts, The Zero Product Property, and Other Such Mathematical Disasters
You know when students bomb on a concept so badly that you make sure to really drill it into next year’s class so it doesn’t ever happen again? Well, my plan completely backfired and then some. While grading the latest quizzes on quadratics, I discovered two conceptual misunderstandings that were emotionally triggering. The results I…
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Less is More
I have way too much stuff. And, like most people, I continue to accumulate more of it. The other day I found myself at a local Italian market in the small town of San Giovanni, where a charming, middle-aged vendor charismatically overtook a crowd of Italian women. He knew his target well. These were women…
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Photo by Tim Mossholder
April Soo 