NCTCA 2022

Ready to understand the geometry of the Radical Rules? Please join me with your graph paper, pencil, ruler, and compass to explore and visualize ALL the radical operations. Participants will draw squares, triangles, rectangles, and other polygons; apply elementary operations and gut instinct to find the patterns that evolve into the Radical Rules. These explorations will help students to easily compare the exact lengths of all radicals, such as √2, √3, √5. Geometry will be the math genre for the debate to prove or disprove many common student misconceptions: √5+√5=√10? or √2+√8=√10 or 2∙3√2=6√4. In addition to clearing up the misconceptions commonly seen in classrooms (as previously mentioned in this description!), participants will gain the depth of the exact value (length) of any radical even though the decimal representation can be irrational!