Community of Adult Math Instructors (CAMI)
teachers learning math together
Many of us are familiar with the 3, 4, 5 right triangle, and maybe the 5, 12, 13. Do you know any others? Is there a pattern to these triples?
As we came in the room, Eric asked us to place a post-it with our name on a voting spectrum he’d drawn on the board, ranging from “Never” to “This morning” under the statement, “The last time I thought about multiplication”.
As we settled in, Eric shared his goals for the meeting. He’s been working on a lesson for students combining some work he’s been doing on area models with a problem that has been consuming him for weeks. Continue reading “Keep it in the Family (with Pythagorean Triples)”
The CAMI Roadshow did a workshop at the CUNY NYC Adult Literacy Institute, January 22, 2016
Tyler and Solange facilitated a problem-posing with visual patterns activity, bringing the exploration from our February 2015 meeting to a wider audience.
Continue reading “CAMI Roadshow: 2016 CUNY NYC Adult Literacy Institute”
What are the odds of winning at craps? Is craps a fair game? What’s your chance of making the point? A three-act math task inspires some questions in probability.
We began by watching a clip from the move, A Bronx Tale. (Be warned: there is some… colorful language in this clip)
Our work on this month’s problem led us to the beginning of a larger exploration of a very curious repeated loop in a certain sequence of numbers.
This month’s problem comes from the 2015 Stanford-Math League Tournament Individual Questions for grades 6 & 7.
This was the third time CAMI tried out using a 3-Act math task. This one is called Royal Flush and is organized around the probability of a poker hand in Texas Hold’em.
Do you play cards? What kinds of cards do you play? What do cards have to do with probability?
The CAMI Roadshow worked with teachers at the 2015 NYC ABE Conference
We talked about problem-posing and inspiring student curiosity in math as we tried out a three-act math task created by Dan Meyer
To start off the meeting, in pairs we discussed – “Real life math”: What does it mean to you? In your classrooms?
At this CAMI meeting we looked at 3 different problems:
We can get conditioned to approach visual patterns in a particular way and jump immediately to the problem of looking for the nth figure (# of squares, for example). Beginning with an open, problem-posing approach can help break us out of that habit and really open up the mathematics.
Usha led us through an exploration of a visual pattern, building off of the work we’ve done at the last two meetings. She used problem posing to enable us to have greater ownership on the problem and to widen options to explore.
We wanted to build off the problem from last meeting, exploring visual patterns, with a focus on different ways of approaching these problems and how can we bring them into the classroom.
