Pythagoreans didn’t really like these numbers – because they couldn’t measure some lengths properly and called them ‘absurd’.
Surds is such an interesting topic which gets introduced to students at class 9 level. I really enjoy teaching and solving problems related to surds. As Math teachers we really clear off a lot of misconceptions while teaching Surds, Example: Adding and subtracting surds as we do collecting like terms in Algebra.
We also relate all laws of Surds to that of Exponents. But in spite of covering all aspects of the topic, this is one area of Mathematics where we find maximum errors committed by our students. I personally feel that students just need lot of practice in this topic so that they get a strong hold of the concepts.
Just gathered some amazing aspects from various sources relating to this topic. Thank everyone for giving all Math teachers such great treasures.
The NCETM suggests a couple of nice ‘hooks’ for getting started teaching surds:
- Ask pupils to find a way of drawing a line with a length of exactly √5 units (the hypotenuse of a right angled triangle with sides 2cm and 1cm)
- Ask pupils to divide the length of an A4 piece of paper by its width. Repeat for A3 and A5. What do they notice? (The answer is always √2)
- Don Steward in his blog mentioned the following interesting activity
I found the following activity shared by Daniel Pearcy in his blog very interesting; It clearly explains why do we need write a surd in its simplest form.
In case you are preparing a worksheet I suggest you incorporate the following:
Multiply
