Welcome.
This is a blog dedicated to math instruction and curricula. You always hear “Math is Everywhere!” from Math teachers and wall posters that came with their new set of precious textbooks, but often it’s more difficult to than you’d hope. And it’s even more difficult to get students thinking about Math outside of the Math classroom. With any luck, we’ll hopefully be able to provide some inspiration for interesting math projects and problems found as we travel through life. Think of this blog as a Math brainstorming site. Ideas are just going to be thrown out there. A lot of them will be discardable, but hopefully a few of them will inspire teachers to more fully develop them and use them in their class.
Some ideas/posts will be more fleshed out than others. Some posts will just be links to or pictures of something we think might be Math relevant, but we’re not quite sure how. It’ll be up to you to fill in the blanks. Sometimes we’ll even provide solutions to problems.
Typically, we like to adhere to student-driven learning. That is, we like for students to come up with the relevant questions upon seeing an artifact. Often it will take a little teacher guidance, but when students come up with the questions, good things happen. Therefore, a typical Emergent Math post will look like this.
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[Artifact: i.e. a picture, a video, a fact, etc. Just basically anything that exists.]
(from Indexed)
[Guiding Questions (GQs): questions that your students have about the artifact, possibly some teacher questions sprinkled in.]
- At what age does the kink in the graph occur?
- Would the slope eventually decrease?
- What are the units for “eyebrow density”?
[Suggested activities (optional): what will the students do once the GQs are made manifest?]
- Discuss.
- Estimate eyebrow density of people of various ages.
- Take measurements?
[Solutions to GQs (optional)]
- 47.
- No.
- Hairs / m²?
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Lastly, we’ll try to keep the commentary to a minimum. Let the administrators worry about that. We’ll also try to keep it PG or PG-13 at the most mature, but no promises there. After all, I used to be a teacher and now work with teachers.
Still in its infantile state, Emergent Math will certainly evolve as it gets older, we hope for the better. See more about the blog here and the author here.
