This is a good video that all math teachers ought to see (heck, I can figure out how to use it as a bell ringer in social studies, I think).
I had to mention it, just because of Michael Tobis’s wonderful headline at Planet 3.0: “Bored in class? Do some math instead.”
I confess to being caught doing math instead, in English, in history — and in art we often made mathematical games to create patterns. From the stuff I see on walls in schools, that’s still popular.
Some time ago I ordered a poster from Max Temkin, the brilliant poster propagandist/artist. It says that the universe is easy to understand if you speak its language, and that language is mathematics. True.
Also true that in most of the disciplines that work into classes we call social studies, we do not have the ability to discern the cool patterns like Fibonacci numbers in pine cones, pineapples and sunflower blossoms. People look for those pattersn in history anyway, and that poses a key problem to policy makers. People want to see a pattern, expect to see a pattern, and historians cannot meet that expectation, other than quoting Santayana.
Maybe one of my students will be the one who discerns a key pattern. It’ll be one of the slackers, if it happens.
i need to learn math fractions
That is seriously cool. Thanks.