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The number line freaks me out (2016)


“Welcome to math class, boys and girls! Today we’ll be drawing a picture that gestures beyond the limits of mortal comprehension.”

No, what keeps me up at night is the stuff between the integers: the numbers a 12-year-old student of mine recently dubbed “the disintegers.” Sure, you can list the decimal digits, but if you ever stop, even after a trillion years, then you will have failed to specify your number – and there is no process by which you can tell a computer to carry on the job. Fawn Nguyen taught a badass lesson where she posed kids the philosophical and mathematical challenge of finding the square root of 7 on a number line.

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Photo of number line

number line