From the Editor’s Laptop
If there is one thing that will get a majority of students involved in a topic, it is relevance—a real-life problem that demands a solution, or a real-life solution that is just asking for a problem. My colleague and I often have discussions on how we can bring these relevant problems into the classroom. Well, this year she came up with a good one that turned into a whole-school activity without my catching on.
To understand how this worked, you need to know a little bit about our school setting. We teach in a K–12 school with a total of 68 students (with the anomaly of having no students in Grade 3). I teach, in multiple subject areas, K–2 and 7–12. All the students know all the teachers, and all the teachers know all the students.
This past December, I married the love of my life. Our favourite wedding gift was a green scrapbook for which every student in kindergarten through Grade 10 had created something for us.
In Art/ELA class, the kindergarten and Grade 1 classes created a wedding picture and wrote some words of wisdom for us.
Grades 2 and 4 were instructed to write instructions on some aspect of life. Topics included how to get a job, how to roast marshmallows, multiple mac-and-cheese recipes and how to love someone.
From Grades 5 and 6 we received formal letters. Now, either Grades 5 and 6 students have only babies and little kids on their minds, or someone prompted them, because we received many instructions on child rearing. Babies cry a lot. They might need help with their homework … and do things without permission … and whine. Make sure that if you have a boy, teach him the ways of hockey, and make sure he likes Sidney Crosby and not, and I mean not, Alexander Ovechkin. … And the list goes on.
And last but not least, my favourite part—the Grades 7–10 contribution. Did you know how much math is involved in planning a wedding? I didn’t realize it myself, but they created all sorts of great problems to solve involving wedding things. “If you have 196 guests, and ¾x of them bring gifts, at an average of 2 per guest, and you get 210 gifts, what is the value of x? Round to the nearest thousandth.” “If the length of Miss Viersen’s stride in her wedding dress is 0.3 m … Miss Viersen takes ½ a stride per second … there are 10 rows of chairs along the aisle … each row is 0.5 m wide … each row is 0.5 m apart from the last row … there is an extra 0.5 m behind the last row … How long will it take Miss Viersen to get down the aisle?” “(A) On her wedding day, Miss Viersen is 5 feet, 6 inches. Usually she is 5 feet, 2 inches. How tall are the heels on Miss Viersen’s shoes? (B) Her heels are what percentage of her total height?”
And I could continue, but the point is that you never know when something can become real performance assessment. Talking to the teachers after the wedding, they told me the kids had worked hard on these problems and assignments; many of them have come back to me, a number of months after the fact, to ask me if I’ve solved their problem, tried their recipe or polished up on my Crosby facts.
I think we’ll agree that great performance activities are good to have in the classroom, but can often take a lot of time to find or create. We’re here to help you. This edition of the newsletter contains a puzzle from last year’s MCATA’s 50th-anniversary conference. It also contains a resource section, for which a few MCATA members submitted some of their favourite places to find good performance activities. Enjoy!
Karen Bouwman
President’s Message
Marj Farris
From the Editor’s Laptop
Karen Bouwman
MCATA Game Quiz
“Math Is Not a Spectator Sport”
2012 MCATA Conference
David Martin
Nominate a Fellow Math Educator
TERM Meeting
MCATA Favourites
Pi in the Sky
Calculation Nation—NCTM
Illuminations—NCTM
Mangahigh.com
