Modern Museum Math

http://mobile.nytimes.com/2013/08/30/arts/design/hands-on-math-lessons-no-homework-required.html

            

            Let’s take a trip to Manhattan to go to a math museum! When you first open the doors, you see tons of children riding bikes and playing with magnets. What they don’t realize is that all the exhibits are teaching you different math concepts. I feel that if we turned classroom lessons more into these exhibits that children would have more fun in the classroom and feel less stress everyday learning math. They don’t see it as a boring lesson anymore, but rather a fun game that everyone can play.

 

                One of the exhibits actually has riding a bike as an activity. These bikes are specifically made to ride on the surface of this circular path. The wheels on the bike are square shaped. Then the path itself was wavy and wrapped around a single point to be forced into a circle. When the children would ride the bikes, the points of the square fit perfectly into the grooves of the waves so that the bike could move forward. However, if the children moved the bigger bikes more toward the center of the circle, they wouldn’t be able to move. This happened because the closer to the center, the closer together the waves become. That way, the bigger square wheels will go over more than one wave at a time and not fit. In its own way, the track is teaching the children shape recognition without them even realizing it!

                Then there is the Human Tree exhibit which teaches kids multiplying and dividing. The children step in front of a screen and their image shows up on it. Then when they put up their arms, their arms turn into their body. So now there are three of them on the screen. This goes on and on until there isn’t enough space on the screen to fit any more. With a cute idea they place flowers on some of the “branches” to make the image seem more like an actual tree. With this specific exhibit the creators are trying to represent multiplication and division. Let’s say you started out with an image of yourself and your two arms just became replications of your body. So we wanted to find the multiple of two and three. So you would start with your main body and draw two bodies off of that. So that gives you the multiple of three that you are working with. Then you have to make sure that each body has two bodies that represent where the arms would go, then you stop adding on to it. Once you finished putting together the drawing on the screen, you just add up how many bodies you have. You should get six, and you can do this for multiple other problems as well.

                The museum doesn’t have set exhibits though. There are traveling shows that are encased in the math museum itself as well. A funny face exhibit is one of these traveling show’s exhibits. You sit in front of a camera that photographs your face. Next the photo is stretched or scrunched to give off the image of a “fun-house mirror”.  There is actually and exact formula using and X and Y coordinates that changes the pixels of the original photo to create this new image.

                This museum uses coordinates, sines, cosines, vectors, hypotenuses, shape recognition, as well as some physics attributes to help teach children in a fun and unique way math skills that are needed in practically every school. It’s definitely worth taking a look at the link at the top and possibly planning a trip to!

 

 

Khan can help!

http://www.khanacademy.org/

         The link above is a wonderful website that my best friend showed me. He has a teacher that isn't great at explaining the math lesson. This website has math lessons from 3rd grade math in the U.S. to calculus. Not only do they have practice problems, but they have videos actually teach you how to do the problems before you even attempt them. They take you through step by step on how to produce the solution. 
           For example, with the lesson on learning multiplication, they have 12 balls in groups. In the video they then go through and explain how you can have 2 groups of 6, 4 groups of 3, 3 groups of 4,...etc. They highlight these groups so that the child can actually see the different groups you can make. It creates a visual way to learn this concept of multiplication. Which is great for students who learn visually like myself!
            The video itself goes slowly and you have that nice ability to rewind the video and see it again and again if you didn't understand the first time. Then when you are practicing, if you need a hint, you are allowed 3. If you get 5 questions in a row correct, you get to move up a level. I can understand how this can be both rewarding and frustrating for a child. They could be working really hard and just not getting the problem. In which case they may not ever get those 5 in a row! However, it may also push them to try harder and do better and improve.
         This visual gives children an easier way to look at math. It reminds me of when we cut the whole into pieces during our percent chapter. In the videos they actually write on the screen to show what they are describing. They also encourage you to pause the video and try the problem on your own. I wish they left more time for you to pause the video before he went on to explain how to do the problem once again.
          I feel as though technology has a lot of negative aspects in today's society. However, I feel like technology in this case could help students to stay caught up in class. I know that if I miss a single day in class its easy for me to fall behind in the lesson. So if I could find out the topic we were learning about, I could find the lesson plans on khan and at least know how to attempt the homework. It can also help students that need help outside of the classroom. Khan can act like a free tutor. As long as the family has internet,  khan will always be there to help you. I only wish that I had known of this website earlier!
            It also has other subjects such as: humanities, economics and finance, and physics. There are group chats where you can talk to people and get support. It also shows you how to do computer programing so you can create your own website that helps others like khan does. There are so many sources that could help you on this website that it would be crazy not to take advantage of them all! Have fun learning!

Common core curse out

I honestly don't understand how all this common core material is going to help students. Especially for students that aren't great at handling school stress to start with. My sister is 9 and is coming home and asking me for help with her math homework. Other kids aren't so lucky to have an older sibling that can sit down and explain this material to them. I babysit kids that have been held inside from recess due to receiving bad grades on their math homework because they haven't even learned the material yet. How are children suppose to perform well on these tests when they are just stressing over them? Plus studying for these tests is now isolating them from their classmates by not being able to participate in recess or playing with the kids in the neighborhood after school.

Thanks to this, mathophobia is probably going to become an even bigger problem as well. Since children are learning more advanced math at a younger age, guess what they are probably going to be able to use! You probably guessed right!! A calculator! Now these children will most likely become little monkeys that push what buttons we tell them too without actually understanding why. Math will just become a process for the next generation, not so much an explanation as to why a theory is proven true.

On top of that, how do we really study for math? Well, the old way used to be to just practice PrAcTiCe PRACTICE! However, with the new common core, reading skills is a major part if the testing as well. So now we need to review with the children how to read the question as well as how to answer it. That also takes away from the time we have to teach the actual math and the concept as to why and how the math works.

I've watched kids have terrible emotions that I don't remeber having as a kid because of all the new math tests. Frustration, anger, guilt, and low self-esteem. These are emotions that children shouldn't experience along with math. It's going to add to this idea of math as being an "evil" subject.

So how is this common core actually helping the students? In my eyes, it just seems to be a way to make the U.S. look smarter and therefore inferior to other countries. However,  how is that truly going to benefit this country if its not in the best interest for the students, and only the students. I think it would be more beneficial to slow things down and to not cram everything that I've learned the past three years in math into a 1st graders brain in one class. It's just too much too fast for them to handle.

Sadly, the only thing these kids are going to learn from the common core is how to funcion a graphing calculator 10 years too early. Oh, just kidding, they are also going to understand what being stressed out feels like well before their middle school years. Today I look back and wish I could be a kid again. None of these children are going to have a childhood they'll want to look back on.