Community of Adult Math Instructors (CAMI)
teachers learning math together
Steve brought us a problem in the form of a financial decision most of us will have to make at some point: When is the best time to start collecting social security benefits?
Steve started the session by asking the group what we knew about social security benefits. It turned out that some people knew a LOT about social security benefits and others (like me) didn’t know too much.
Continue reading “Optimizing Social Security Benefits”Bicycles are everywhere. Most of us know how to ride them. Many ride a few times a week. But have you thought about how the gears of a bike work? It’s stranger than you might think.
I started the meeting with a notice/wonder on some images from the history of the bicycle. Here are the images, with some of the things the group noticed and wondered, followed by some comments from me.
Ramon had his students work on research projects, sharing their cultural backgrounds and relating them to mathematics. He shared the results of one student’s project and then led us into an exploration of the New York City street game called skellzies, skully caps, skellies, etc. (depending where and when you grew up in the city.)
When we walked into the room, this was on the board:
Teaching Problem: For three consecutive semesters, an adult education teacher began classes with roughly 36 students and ended with roughly 12 students. What can the teacher try that will help to reduce attrition?
In our first evening meeting, Eric shared a web site that turns pairs of numbers in diagrams. But how does it work?
(This meeting was based on an underground mathematics lesson, Fawn Nguyen’s post and Michael Lawler’s videos. Thank you all!)
I started the meeting by showing the group the Picture This! web site that turns pairs of numbers into a diagram visualization. I asked for a volunteer to give me two numbers, each less than 10. The first suggestion was 3 & 7. I entered the number into Picture This and this diagram was returned.
We explored a problem related to volume and surface area with multiple solutions. But wasn’t one of them more right than the others?
–Updated April 2, 2021 to remove the Wet Phone task published originally in Middle Grades Geometry and Measurement (Steele, 2006). Our apologies to the author Michael Steele for posting your intellectual property.–
Cynthia started today’s meeting by saying that she would be sharing a problem from a recent workshop she attended on multiple solution tasks (MSTs). These problems are designed so that there are multiple correct solutions. In our math circle, we have grown accustomed to seeing multiple strategies for solving a problem, but usually there is one correct solution. Even after we saw different solutions later on, there was something nagging at me. Are they both equally correct? Really? Continue reading “The Wet Iphone Task”
We welcomed two first time CAMI members to a meeting where we once again looked deeply at something that is so familiar, we take it for granted. Greg Fein’s exploration helped us to unpack tic-tac-toe and find the math. It turns out is an ancient game with roots all over the world, with perhaps something innately human at the heart of it.
Greg started by putting a familiar drawing on the board and asked us what came to mind:
We responded with “tic-tac-toe, hashtag, 9 squares, right angles. parallel lines…”
Greg then focused us on our first impression and asked us to remember the rules of tic-tac-toe:
Continue reading “There’s More to Tic Tac Toe than You Know…”
In this meeting we looked at the divisibility rules for 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 8, 9 and 10 and tried writing our own rules for larger numbers.
In this meeting hosted at 3rd Avenue VFW by teachers at MDC Brooklyn, we continued recent explorations into multiplication and factors. In this meeting, we looked at divisibility rules. After a pair/share and introductions, I asked the group to look at multiples of 9 and share what patterns they noticed. We shared in small groups then talked about a few things people noticed.
Have you ever noticed the money left over on a Metrocard when you have “insufficient funds” to ride the train? Is it possible to break even? It seems to be part of an MTA conspiracy.
In this meeting on our third anniversary, I tried out a 3-Act Math Task I’ve been planning for a while. It’s got to do with the 5% bonus the MTA gives us on non-unlimited MetroCards and the odd remainders I often find when I run out of funds on the card.
Several engaging activities for exploring factors. Which would you use for HSE math classes and how would you use them?
I puzzled over what to bring to today’s meeting for days. I have a couple unfinished problems that I’ve been thinking to bring to a CAMI meeting, but in the end I chose to go with a few activities on factors, mostly from Fostering Algebraic Thinking, by Mark Driscoll. A group of us read the book last summer and loved the problems. There were so many good ones that we weren’t able to solve them all while reading the book. I went into this meeting hoping that the surprise of the central problem wouldn’t be ruined. Continue reading “Multiple Factors”
This task, from Mathematical Mindsets, by Jo Boaler, asked us to explore how area and volume are affected when shapes are scaled up in size. For example, if you double the dimensions of a square, how is the area affected? What if you triple the dimensions?
We used this meeting to explore a problem from Mathematical Mindsets by Jo Boaler. I had worked on it a few weeks ago as part of an online book group with LINCS. I decided not to give out all the questions in the task at once, but you can look at the problem URL above to see the whole thing. Continue reading “Growing Rectangles”
