Math & World Cultures
Share your project questions, kudos, and concerns.
posted by ASL at 6:44 PM
Friday, October 06, 2006
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Welcome to the Mathematics for Elementary School Teachers Blog. This is the place where students at Seattle Central Community College can discuss their course projects. Please check into the Blog space for your project theme.
9 Comments:
A great source for looking at bases other than ten, as well as the evolution of numerical symbol systems, is Pi in the Sky, by John D. Barrow. It's written in a very compelling style that lends to the excitement of the subject matter.
My project involves getting the kids from my tutoring center to bring in some recipes from any country of their choice. So far my return on this request has been marginal at best-- the kids don't really understand where I'm trying to go with this, maybe I didn't make myself clear enough because I wanted to wait on the data before I created math problems from it. So I'm going ahead and finding some recipes of my own, and I'll have pictures of them from cookbooks along with nutritional information, perhaps a highlighted map to show the location of the country. But, a word to those that might be looking to get the kids to collect their own data: They might not bring back info that is very useful, since they don't understand what you're going to do with it. It might be best to go ahead and be a bit arbitrary in your selection of data, so you can be sure that it suits your purposes.
This is a very common issue with students. Here are some solution ideas that might help students have buy-in: (1) Show them sample recipes that fit your criteria, and ones that don't. Have them tell you the differences. This way they have discussed what needs to be in a recipe for it to work for your project.(2)Supply them with recipe books that include recipes from different countries, and ask them to choose one. (3)Provide a list of countries, give each student an index card to put their name and their top three country choices. Then you sort them into groups by country, providing recipes from which they can choose.(4)Take them to a computer lab and let them search for recipes, and you can approve of not before they print them out.
Don't know that it would help but I have cookbooks from Norway, Switzerland, the Middle East and others - Clarke
Thanks Clarke. I've gone ahead and taken the recipes that they gave me, which weren't quantitative, and found quantitative recipes that are for the same dishes. It seems that my project is morphing slightly to be less about world cultures and more about nutrition. It will be a challenge to keep reining in on the aspect of world cultures, but I think I'll be able to do it by using recipes that have interesting, geographically specific ingredients.
Well, I had my first lesson with the kids last week. Rather than focusing on math, I gave them a general overview of the purpose of the math that we will be doing next Tuesday, by discussing the functions of the various nutrients that we'll be quantifying from the recipes. They seemed to 'get it,' and so we'll have to see how things go on Tuesday. There's a lot of them (12!) because I offered them pizza if they'd show up. Incentives really seem to have an impact...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ym4q78ZVUyw here is a great clip from an old movie--procedures can be frustrating--what can you do when a student is adament that their process works???
This clip is priceless! (Back to figures, drawings, to demonstrate?!)
The clip is quite amazing. I'll use it next time I am getting one fifth of 25% of something. I'll just make sure I get paid first. Very funny. I might try it on some other number, but, I suspect it only works with a few.
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