Abstract
Would your students be surprised to see a use for partial fractions? Would they benefit from “jumping in” and constructing some mathematics, even though they may have had little prior experience with collecting data, working in groups, and “talking mathematics”? Students who have taken part in this exploration—which involves drawing pictures to collect data, conjecturing a recurrence relation, and solving such a relation using geometric series and partial fractions—have been genuinely pleased to see the pieces fit together and their cooperative effort yield a signficant final product. The activity develops connections among mathematical topics, as described in the NCTM’s Curriculum and Evaluation Standards for School Mathematics (1989), and promotes teaching discrete mathematics at the secondary school level. It has been classroom tested at several levels, including a sophomore college-level course in discrete mathematics for prospective elementary and secondary school teachers.
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