Pi Day (with minimal mention of digits)

Posted on March 15, 2017 by Andrew

Today, we celebrated our belated Pi Day! It was delayed due to inclement weather…

Though my #MTBoS friends were there to comfort me in my time of need!

@bkdidact that’s the rounded up version anyway, none of this truncated 3/14 crap
— Jonathan (@rawrdimus) March 13, 2017

Our spring trimester focus is always financial literacy. So, we spent most of last week researching recipes, planning for a shopping trip, going to the bank, shopping for ingredients, and making pies. Yes, I said it. We made pies for Pi Day, sue me! Now, finally the time had come to eat our pies, but first…we had to do some more math!

First we reviewed of some of the digits of Pi, highlighting that when rounded to the nearest hundredth it matches the numerical date of March 14th, which is subsequently known as “Pi Day” for this reason. I also wore my Pi shirt, which gives the students an opportunity to see that there are A LOT of digits in this number known as Pi and that I’m a nerd. We did, however, skip the traditional digit memorization activity for several reasons including working memory and tedious boredom.

Instead we estimated, explored, and discovered the circumference formula with our pies and some string.

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An Inch Wide and An Inch Deep: A Call To Action

Posted on March 23, 2016 by Andrew

One of the most popular ways to critically describe mathematics education in the United States is “a mile wide and an inch deep.” The TL;DR is that most mathematics education focuses on too broad an array of topics with a lack of emphasis on conceptual understanding and critical thinking.

My worry is that most special education math classes are an inch wide and an inch deep. I ran across this chart from Browder, Spooner, Ahlgrim-Delzell, Harris, Wakeman (2008).

Demonstrated here is a clear focus on an extremely small amount of topics and the only one investigated in any kind of depth is financial literacy, which admittedly is an extremely important topic for students with disabilities. For students with disabilities to be successful members of their communities they need to be financially literate. But this need should not preclude students with disabilities from exploring other mathematical topics.

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Simple Prompts Can Lead to Complex Mathematical Thinking

Posted on March 3, 2015 by Andrew

This post is inspired by chapter 8 of Steve Leinwand’s book Accessible Mathematics. If you haven’t read this book, do it! Leinwand is a leading voice in the push for math instruction that makes sense to students and will lead to longer lasting mathematical understanding. Chapter 8 is entitled, “How Big, How Far, How Much?” and in it Leinwand encourages this instructional shift:

Tie the math to such questions as How big? How much? How far? to increase the natural use of measurement throughout the curriculum.

He goes on to say that measurement as a mathematical skill is often a “skipped chapter,” but is also one of the most pervasive life skills in the mathematics curriculum. Leinwand goes on to encourage teachers to incorporate measurement as “an ongoing part of daily instruction and the entry point for a larger chunk of the curriculum” (p. 46).

The game shelf!

Now you may be saying, “But I have a million other goals and standards and expectations and test prepping and whatnot that I have to do before I teach the kids to use a ruler!”

Well, lucky for you the Standards for Mathematical Practice also have you covered.

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