Community of Adult Math Instructors (CAMI)
teachers learning math together
Usha and Sophie led a frenzy of folding, observing, counting, and predicting at Fashion Industries High School.
Update: Check out these related videos —> Numberphile | Doodling in Math Class | Wrong Turn on the Dragon
It was a beautiful spring day when Usha and Sophie represented CAMI at the 40th anniversary of the New York City Adult Basic Education Conference. Sophie gave a little history of CAMI…
We learned how to draw interlocking knots and investigated mathematical questions related to counting features of the knots.
We started by looking at a few Celtic knots and thinking about what we noticed and wondered.
Maybe you’ll take a few notes before you move to the next page…
Continue reading “Celtic Knots”Starting with a colorful visual representation of numbers, we looked at a series of problems based on prime factors.
For the last few months, I’ve been working on study materials on exponents and roots. While doing research for the packet, I started to get interested in factors and especially prime factors. It turns out that they are really useful for thinking about lots of different kinds of math that we have been looking recently. For example, the mathematics of bicycle gears or Spirograph both have to do with factors, as do fractions, place value, exponents and other math that is relevant to math teaching in adult literacy.
Continue reading “Playing with Prime Factors”How do the functions for converting between Celsius and Fahrenheit work? Temperature talk during the coldest week of 2019 thus far.
At our evening CAMI meeting earlier this month, Kevin Winkler from CUNY Start led us in an exploration of the conversion between Celsius and Fahrenheit based on something strange he noticed while crossing the Brooklyn Bridge.
I wanted to bring that idea to the afternoon CAMI meeting, and also try to scaffold the exploration a bit, so that we could extend the invitation to our students. It also just happened to be the week where the Midwest was experiencing such cold weather that friends in Minnesota kept making the same joke over and over again about the temperatures there being colder than they were in Antarctica.
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.
Sophie gave us an introduction to the strange world of Exploding Dots, which can be used to represent all kinds of math. We started with place value.
In July’s evening CAMI meeting, we met an interesting machine, the “two one” machine, written like this: 1<–2 machine.
Here’s how the machine works:
We can add dots to the box on the far right – as many as we want! Whenever there are two dots in the same box…
…they EXPLODE!
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.
Eric shared activities from a draft lesson on factors, multiples, primes and composites. The lesson is linked in the post if you are interested in using the materials from the meeting. He would love feedback if you use it with a class.
To start off the meeting, Eric put us into groups and gave each group a bag of paper tiles. He asked us to spend a few minutes looking at them and discussing anything we noticed.
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…”
