All teachers of mathematics will learn from James’s approach... Even if you do not teach this topic you will learn much about teaching by watching and listening to James at work... The question “Does order matter?” has induced so much mental anguish and woe for students and teachers alike in the study of advanced counting, unnecessarily so in James' opinion. The trouble is that the standard curriculum insists on placing a distinction between a “permutation” and a “combination” and giving students separate formulas to memorize for each. In this workshop, which will be linked to the Alberta Program of Studies, James will present a successful – and mathematically natural – approach to counting problems that makes no distinction between the two notions, thereby completely avoiding the need to ask the question of order. Students can naturally approach the entire curriculum content from a place of ease and comfortable personal understanding, and find joy in the study of combinatorics. This session will be presented as a three-step process: Step 1: The Multiplication Principle Step 2: Rearranging Letters, Step 3: Labeling
