Mathematics Applications

This authentic rainbow biscuit was hand-rolled by my friend's two year old daughter. How does this apply to maths? Well I guess she had to mentally appraise the length of the tubes when rolling to make sure they would meet relatively evenly at the edges.


I recently read in the Courier Mail (article by Tanya Chilcott) that the draft national curriculum includes four hours per week of maths for Prep to Year 10 students. Most schools apparently currently teach around 3.5 hours per week of maths. With this increased focus it will become even more important to create engaging maths lessons out of traditionally non-maths topics. Some examples I can think of are:

1. Maths in cooking: eg. "doubling the recipe" or other such multiplications, creating shapes and measuring perimeters, areas and volume of various foods and liquids, GST calculations on grocery purchases, logistics of food distribution, storage and use.

2. Maths in Health and Physical Education: eg. classroom statistics on student lap times, graphs of heart rate vs height and weight.

There must be many more examples, please contribute your ideas !

If maths lessons become less focused on following a textbook and more integrated into 'everyday topics,' such as cooking and physical education, students may be better able to relate to the topic. Now comes the crux of my blog posting, I hope you are still reading. Most maths textbooks have student exercises and answers can be found at the back of the textbook. Maths problems created by the teacher that are based on 'everyday topics' will not have pre-calculated answers at the back of a book. Students will have to become proficient at gauging the correctness of their own work and use strategies to check for accuracy.

One way to encourage students to self-check is to publish their work. When I become a learning manager my students may have to use a class blog. One student each week will be responsible for posting their answers to set homework questions onto the class blog. Other students may then check their own work against the answers posted to the blog and provide comment if they believe the answer should be different. Among other Habits of Mind (see Dimension 5 of Marzano and Pickering's "Dimensions of Learning: Teacher's Manual," 1997), this process may build student's critical thinking skills.