Seedbed

The Math Forum

Seedbed
Throughout the 1980s, Seedbed published articles on "the intellectual growth of children, and teachers' participation therein." At its simplest, the journal let teachers share ideas with other teachers.

Introducing the journal's inaugural issue, editor Tom O'Brien wrote:

[A]rticles should act as intellectual seedlings, to be grown and nurtured and extended by the reader, and the writer should feel a strong sense of, 'Oh boy, this is a good idea. It's too good to keep to myself.'

As will be immediately clear from the articles herein, teachers are capable of immensely rich thinking. This is a notion not widely appreciated, not the least by American teachers themselves.... [T]eachers as a professional group are quite capable of bringing health to this often sickly organism called American education.

Thomas C. O'Brien
February 1979

Each PDF below consists of scanned images of an issue's pages, and ranges in size from 2.7MB to 12.7MB. The Math Forum regrets the occasional missing or extra blank page.

Volume 1, Issue 1 (February 1979): Right Angle Paths ... An Attack on the Area of a Square ... My Math Education Is Gone ...
Volume 2, Issue 2 (July 1979): Patterns and Problems ... Solar Eclipse ... It May Seem that Way, but TV Isn't a Surrogate Parent ...
Volume 1, Issue 3 (October 1979): Mastermind for Young Children ... The Process Approach to Problem Solving ... Dice, Dominoes, and Thinking ...
Number 4 (February 1980): Cluster Games ... A School-Wide Approach to Language Development ... Cryptograms — What's the Code? ...
Number 5 (May 1980): Collaborative Writing ... Samples of Making up Stories after Looking at Pictures ... Kindergarten Children Count the Squares ...
Number 6 (August 1980): Towards a Feeling for Numbers ... Two Problem Sets — From Skills to Math ... What's Basic? A Constructivist View ...
Number 8 (March 1981): Diary of a Teachers' Center Meeting ... An Overview of the East St. Louis Seminar for Teachers ... Two Simple Problems ...
Number 9 (July 1981): So What's New? ... Creationism, Politics and Public Schools ... Estimation ...

Right-truncatable Prime Numbers, from Seedbed 8

A Christmas Card from the Netherlands, from Seedbed 11

Number 10 (November 1981): Fishing ... At the Blackboard ... Concentration ...
Number 11 (February 1982): A Copy of Reality ... I Like It Better When I Learn Something ... Make a Square ...
Number 12 (August 1982): Area ... Applying Piaget's Theory to Third Grade Math ... About Myself ...
Special Issue: Away from Basal Texts (August 1982): Mathematics Their Way (Addison-Wesley) ... Focus on Geometry (Activity Resources Company) ... Geometric Images (Association of Teachers of Mathematics) ...
Number 14 (January 1983): Sharing ... A Parent Inquired and I Replied How, What, Where, When and Why ... Applied Piaget ...
Number 15 (January 1983): Professional Development ... Pizza Math ... Rearranging Two Triangles ...
Number 16 (July 1983): Congruent Halves ... Recent Piagetian Research ... Excerpts from Education and the Cult of Efficiency ...
Number 17: Computers in Education (December 1983): Five Essays on Computers in Education ... An Apple for the Teacher ... An Interview with Marge Kosel ...

Number 18 (April 1984): The Four "-izations" ... Interview Report ... My First Teacher, Our Last Visit ...
Number 19 (April 1984): The Typewriter Keyboard — The First Step to Computer Learning ... Ten ... Some Recent Child-Watching Experiences ...
Number 21 (November 1984): Computer Software in Education ... In Defense of Computer Labs ... What Is CompuServe? ...
Number 22 (June 1985): British Eyes on American Mathematics ... A Square Peg in a Round Hole: Or, Can Math Be Fun? ... Developing Number Concepts through Use of the Calendar ...
Number 23 (June 1985): The Little Boy ... Lurking I ... The Third Wave (book review) ...
Number 24 (January 1986): Dalton Foljambe — A Model School ... Preparing to Teach a Topic ... Observations and Thoughts on British Education ...
Number 25 (July 1986): A Look at Children Drawing ... Kindergarten — A Time for Exploration ... Making Patterns ...
Number 26 (July 1986): A New Flag ... Child Watching Experiences ... My Game of Tens Patience ...

What Are We Preparing Them For?, from Seedbed 25

Techniques for Evaluating Attitudes toward Math, from Seedbed 33

Number 27 (May 1987): Summer 1986: An Experience in Problem Solving ... How Many Lines of Symmetry ... Third Graders and Multiplication ...
Number 28 (May 1987): Development of a Mind — So That's What Schools Are About! ... The Teaching of Young Children (book review) ... Can a Third Grader Write a Story? ...
Number 29 (February 1988): Conservation of Displacement — Volume ... A Tale of Two Cultures: A Look at the U.S. Elementary Education from an English Point of View ... Multiples of Three ...
Number 30: Children and Mathematics, A Winning Combination in the Land of the Giant Panda (March 1988): General Observations and Impressions ... Education ... Themes in Chinese Society and Education ...
Number 31 (November 1988): Impressions of Birk Hill School, Eckington, Derbyshire, England ... A Visit to a British School ... A British Teacher Shares Some Views on American Education ...
Number 32 (June 1989): The Greatest Love of All ... Some Personal Thoughts ... Hand Thinking and Visual Thinking ...
Number 33 (January 1990): Decimals and Money ... Problem-Solving and the Learning Disabled Adolescent ... Motivation: A Geometric Progression ...
Number 34 (February 1990): Mrs. D. and the Lesson of the Day ... Marking Wrong Answers ... Tangrams ...

Number 35 (March 1990): Computer in the Classroom ... Conservation — Their Way ... Observations ...
Number 36 (May 1990): Graphing Rascals ... Dominoes Probability Game ... Nutty Fun ...
Number 37 (March 1991): Cooperative Problem Solving ... Recipe — Brownies ... Borrowing in Subtraction ...
Number 38 (May 1991): But Are They Learning? ... Learning Is a Game with Life As Its Playing Field ... Make Your Own Counting Pebbles ...
Number 39: Working Together Across the Nations — Hungary & USA (April 1992): Lizards ... From Home to School ... Teachers' Lockers ...
Number 40 (August 1992): Using a Weekly Shoppers' Circular ... Who Am I? ... Perfect Square? ...
Number 41 (September 1993): The Geometer's Sketchpad, Version 2 ... Mathematics Their Way (book review) ... Reflections on Teacher Intervention (book review) ...
Number 42 (September 1993): Mathematics — A Way of Thinking (book review) ... Summary of the Underachieving Curriculum: Assessing U.S. Schools from an International Perspective ... Maths in Context — Powers of Ten ...

Tic Tac Toe, from Seedbed 35

There are not many practical journals in education.

There are not many journals where teachers are the principal authors and where teachers' concerns are paramount.

There are not many journals in education where coal-face issues of teaching, rather than airy-fairy issues, are addressed.

There are not many non-commercial journals in education.

There are not many journals in education which have a point of view ... fewer whose point of view is child centered and based on research.

There are not many journals in education, world-wide, which fit these criteria and which have reached their fortieth issue!

This is Seedbed 40. It fits.

Thomas C. O'Brien
August 1992

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