I read the Article entitled How Does Your Doughnut Measure up
Bibliography
Paula Maida Michael Maida, Natrional Council of Teaching Mathematics: Mathematics Teaching in middle school. Vol 11. NO. 5 How does your Doughnut Measure up? December 2005/January 2006.
The main ideas of this article is to communicate that math has real life practical applications to every day things. They showed this by going into a class room and having the kids calcule the area, volume and surface area of a doughnut. They asked the students to first find the diameter of the inner and outer circles of the doughnut measuring the height and so forth. Then they asked about accuracy whether there calculations were an over or under estimate of the actual doghnut dimensions. this gave the kids a practicul real life aplication of math with every day things such as doughnuts.
I think it is very important for math to have real life practical applications for sudents and especailly young students so that is is not just a boring subject that they are being forced to learn. It is important to make math interesting for the learner. The children in this class room were able to learn a lot about math while they were having fun with douhnuts. This way math becomes more real to them and not this abstract idea and concept they have to put up with. Math you can eat! Thats my kind of math! (reading this article actually made me hungry for a douhnut!)
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I thought that the topic sentence for the first paragraph was clear and supported by the rest of the paragraph. I wondered, however, why the kids were doing all of these measurements and computations with donuts. Was there a purpose besides just finding inner and outer circumferences? If not, this activity seems somewhat contrived. Certainly we can do mathematics about real world contexts, but if we don't have a legitimate purpose for doing so, kids will see right through it and know that we are just trying to sucker them into doing more math.
ReplyDeleteIn your second paragraph, you talk about real world contexts being valuable because they are fun and can motivate students. While I am not against fun mathematics, I am against activities that emphasize fun at the expense of learning mathematics. For example, what mathematics were the students actually learning in this activity? Also, using a real world context doesn't always motivate students. If you don't believe me, think about the word problem, "A train leaves Chicago at noon and head due south at 55 mph, while a train leaves the same station two hours later traveling northwest at 60 miles per hour. What is the distance between the trains at 5 pm?" I can guarantee that when most kids hear a problem like this, they want to scream.
I thought there was a clear topic sentence. I liked the concise language used. There was also a lot of really good examples that explained the point of the article. I think this would be a great activity for students anywhere. The only thing I wanted was more about why this is important. Maybe the article didn't discuss it, but I wanted to know why its important for students to see real world examples.
ReplyDeleteI thought this was a rather interesting blog post. You did a great job with giving examples from the article like the prompt asked for. However, there were no quotes. You had an awesome topic sentence and stuck to that main topic. I did wish for maybe a little more info on the main topic instead of being given only an example for the first paragraph. Did the article talk about the importance of having real-life applications for mathematical concepts? Nice job on your post.
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