Community of Adult Math Instructors (CAMI)
teachers learning math together
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.
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.
CAMI did a few workshops in April, sharing our teaching circle’s work on exploring real-life math through three-act math tasks.
Eric and Mark did a workshop at the 2017 COABE Conference in Orlando called Mathematical Modeling: Questions from a Math Teachers’ Circle. A few weeks later at the NYC ABE Conference, Brian took the lead and together with Mark and Eric did a similar workshop called 3-Act Math Tasks: Let Students Build the Problem. Continue reading “CAMI Roadshow: 2017 COABE and NYC Adult Basic Education Conferences”
Draw a rectangle on grid paper and draw a diagonal. Is there a way to predict the number of squares the diagonal will pass through?
I have been thinking about MP3 from the Common Core, specifically about how to get students to make conjectures, to test those conjectures and to refine their conjectures when it turned out they were not always true. I was also thinking about student perseverance and helping them not get too frustrated. I’ve done some activities like Marilyn Burns’ consecutive sums problem (see additional resources below), but I want something that feels messier and a little more unwieldy. Continue reading “Making and Testing Conjectures: The Diagonal Problem”
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)
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?
For our second three-act math task, we learn it is sometimes just as interesting when mathematical models do not work and we have to figure out why.
This week, CAMI continued learning about Dan Meyer’s three-act math model by working on the Super Stairs problem. In keeping with the three-act framework, we started the meeting by watching the short video
below a few times and then posing some questions. Continue reading “Three-Act Math: Super Stairs”
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?
