If the goal is for students to be able to go out and identify a diamond when they see one, or know what is meant by that word when they read or hear it, then it seems like a good idea to teach kids what a "diamond" is. First, Doctor Ian talked about the need to clarify the question, which didn’t identify the type of “mathematical context” under consideration: I guess how you would approach this depends on what it is you're trying to teach. Not sure what to tell students if it is appropriate to call it a diamond or not? I have always thought that a diamond was a "shape," but it does not appear to be used in primary school mathematics. How is this word appropriate or not appropriate in a mathematical context?
I have researched but cannot find an authoritative definition. Many people use the term "diamond" to describe certain mathematical shapes.
#The diamond dimensions how to#
No pun intended!) A Diamond Is Forever Unclear, As a Term - and How to Teach from That The assignment should have been to discuss it themselves, because there are many facets that might be explored.
#The diamond dimensions archive#
(As it turned out, it didn’t get into the archive until 2013 due to a backlog after that, students apparently found it and stopped asking us, suggesting that they hadn’t actually been assigned to write to us, which would have been thoughtless, but only to find an answer online. In 2010, after getting dozens of these questions in 2009 (some pretending to be children, though using a college address), we got the following relatively well-expressed question, and decided it was time to put an answer into the archive, so we could refer to it. Few responded to our questions, though there were a couple good discussions. We gave answers ranging from a mere question like, “What does ‘appropriate’ mean to you?” (when the student showed no thought at all), to some deeper comments (when the student appeared to have pondered the question themselves). Sometimes this was accompanied by the question, “Is a square a rectangle?” How is this word appropriate or not appropriate in a mathematical context?”. The word “diamond” is not a formal mathematical term some people take it as equivalent to “rhombus”, while others equate it to “kite”, or treat it as either a “tilted square” or any rhombus oriented so that the long diagonal is vertical (“standing on a point”).įrom 2009 to 2013, about every six months (June and December) we would get a number of questions from a class of college students in Australia, asking the same question (or a bad paraphrase): “Many people use the term ‘diamond’ for certain mathematical shapes. Having discussed various issues involving categorizing shapes, let’s take a look at a very different shape question, which didn’t fit into the last post.