From Our Math Coach Ben Geiger
“When will I ever use this? What’s the point?” All math teachers have heard and many of us have said to ourselves or out loud in math class, “When will I ever use this? What’s the point?”
These are fair questions. Instruction, in order to make an impact on students, must be relevant and purposeful to those involved in the learning. If not, it’s just the teacher up their talking and asking questions – imagine the sound of the teacher’s voice from the Peanuts comic strip, “Waa, waa, waa, waa, waa!”
As an elementary math teacher for almost twenty years, I’ve been part of a good number of lessons, many more than I’d like to admit, where I felt like I was speaking Swahili and everyone else was listening in English. The lesson I was leading didn’t have the impact on students that I had hoped for
or planned. There was a disconnect between my objectives as a teacher and what my students understood about why they were learning this material.
The difficult thing in math especially, but in other subjects as well, is the fact that it’s not always obvious how some topics will ever be used. Here is one example from Baldwin, first graders are learning how shapes fit into different categories based on their attributes. When will these children every sort shapes in life? Why is it worthwhile to learn how to identify the unique features of a triangle or trapezoid? How many of you, math teachers not included, have used the word trapezoid as an adult? How is it relevant to a child’s life if he or she can tell you that a trapezoid has four sides and exactly one pair of parallel sides?
Well, knowing the term trapezoid may not be that important, but what is important is learning how categorize objects and things in the world based on common attributes. The thinking skill necessary to categorize with defined criteria allows people in the world to do all sorts of work and solve all kinds of problems.
Even more important perhaps though, even beyond the thinking skill relevant to any math topic, is the problem solving ability being developed when children are engaged in math learning. To solve a problem, one must go through a series of analytical steps that are important in almost any line of work. First, you have to understand the problem, second use a strategy to solve, third check back to see if that strategy solved the problem, and finally reflect on whether there was an easier or more efficient way of solving such a problem.
If children get opportunities to solve real problems--problems where they don’t automatically know how to solve before they finish reading, where they must work to understand and then perhaps try several strategies, they will earn an invaluable life skill about being a critical and rigorous thinker.
Here’s how you can help us, help children, develop their problem solving skills.
Encourage stick–to–itiveness. Even if students are not going to major in science, technology, engineering and math, they need to know that the analytical skills are skills you need for life, said Michele Weslander-Quaid, chief innovation evangelist for Google. Educators need to help give them the life skills — the tenacity — the growth mind set to solve difficult problems, she said. “Test scores tell you one thing, but the tenacity you build through solving hard problems gives you the courage and confidence to do what you want in life.” (Math Education Smartbrief, January 14, 2015)
When children wonder why they should be learning something that doesn’t seem important to them or relevant, push back and discuss how they are learning to think and use their mind to solve problems. And keep in mind that sometimes, practice of a particular skill, like multiplication facts, is a necessary step to allow them to problem solve. A brain needs to be freed up to be analytical and can’t be bogged down in thinking through the simple arithmetic involved in such problems.
Engage in problem solving. Solve puzzles like Sudoku and crosswords, and what you or your child did to figure out the answer.
Just as you read to your children perhaps before bed, sometimes solve problems. One resource to use to get problems is
www.bedtimemath.org.
Math Problem of the Month
The problem of the month comes from
www.bedtimemath.org
.
Today is National Dress up Your Pet Day in the U.S., in case you weren’t already doing that and needed a good reason. We have no idea how this holiday started, but we’re guessing it wasn’t the pets who asked for it. True you can buy nice-fitting
clothes cut the right size for pets, as we see from this costume here, turning Hercules the pug into a pig. Companies make sweaters and booties for all different sizes of dogs, too. And people buy this stuff: as comedian John Oliver has said,
Americans spent $310 million on costumes for pets last year. But some people just shove their regular clothes and jewelry onto their furry friend, and hope all those legs will find a place to go. This is one case where owning a pet octopus will make
things trickier.
Wee ones: If you did have to dress up your pet octopus, what numbers would you say to count off its 8 legs?
Little kids: If you have 3 guinea pigs and sew a little sweater, hat and scarf for each of them, how many items do you make for them? Bonus: The problem here is that guinea pigs love to chew. If they chew up all the hats and 1 of the scarves, how
many items of clothing are left?
Big kids: If 27 dogs are romping around the dog park and 1/3 of them are dressed up for today, how many dogs are wearing clothes? Bonus: If 9 more dogs show up and now the total dogs are wearing outfits, how many of the new dogs came to the party dressed up?
Answers are below...
Answers:
Wee ones: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8.
Little kids: 9 items. Bonus: 5 items, since they chewed up 4.
Big kids: 9 dogs. Bonus: All of them, since you now have 36 dogs where 18 are dressed up.