math education
How Do You Measure Up?
I have a math-teacher confession. (Again.) It’s not something I’m proud of. Not something I like to admit.
I’m not very good at estimating measurements.
Oh, I’m okay at the small stuff, particularly with length. I can say, “This is about two inches,” or even, “That’s about fifteen centimeters.” But if you go much beyond something I can hold in my hands, I’m pretty hopeless.
This drove me nuts in driver’s ed. Rules like, “When parking on the street, you must be X feet from the corner,” were useless for me. Thirty feet, fifty feet, doesn’t matter. I have no mental gauge for a distance like that.
Weights are even worse. Give me something and ask me if it’s closer to five pounds or ten, and I’ll be straight-up guessing. I know the fifty-pound bags of salt are pretty close to the limit of what I can comfortably lug around, so if something else is close to that, my guesstimate will be okay.
You know what this all has in common? Experience.
I can estimate lengths of things smaller than a breadbox because I’ve done a lot of measuring with a 12-inch ruler. I can tell when things are close to that fifty-pound mark because lugging those salt bags down to the basement is a memorable experience. I don’t have a lot of experience measuring and knowing larger distances.
I bet if I played football, I’d have a pretty good feel for five yards vs. ten yards vs. twenty.
Except … I have students who play football and don’t know what a yard is.
*headdesk*
As much as I’m not great with measurement, it’s a much weaker area for many of my students. (Oh, if I could tell you how many times I’ve asked, “How many inches are in a foot?” or even, “How many months in a year?” and gotten blank stares!) Some of it’s a language issue, and some is that it hasn’t been prioritized in their previous years of math education. Mostly, it’s a combination of both.
So, students in some of my math classes will be attacking objects with rulers and yardsticks and tape measures and scales. I will throw lots of questions at them like, “If you were measuring the water to fill up a bathtub, would you use gallons or cups?” And I will hope some of it sinks in.
What mad measurement skills do you have? What areas trip you up? Any tips or tricks? I’d love to hear ’em.
Speak up:
2 commentsGender Wars, Math-Style
This isn’t a war so much as an observation. Not even a highly scientific observation. It’s not based on a fancy statistical study or anything, just my own observations in my classroom over the years. The conclusion isn’t anything like 100%, but the vast majority in my small sample seems to follow the pattern.
Because I’ve taught in the same small school for several years, I’ve often followed the same group of students from Algebra 1 on up, some of them all the way to Calculus. I’ve kept an eye on what students liked and didn’t like, what methods they chose when given a choice, and where their strengths and weaknesses were.
By and large (again, in my relatively small sample), girls prefer the analytical and algebraic. They’d rather have an equation to manipulate and solve, going step by step to isolate the variable. Boys prefer more visual approaches—geometry over algebra, analyzing a graph over an equation. There have been a couple of exceptions, but every year I’ve had more kids split down the expected line.
I’ve found this particularly interesting since these are all deaf and hard-of-hearing students, so you might expect they’d all lean toward the visual approach. Is it something in how males and females are respectively wired that makes us tend to lean toward one or the other? I remember reading things in school about how girls tend to be stronger in verbal-linguistic areas, while boys are stronger in logical-mathematical areas. (Again, these are just tendencies and obviously not true across the board.) Perhaps this is something similar.
Or maybe my students are just strange. 🙂
Do you fall into my expected categories or defy them? Have you noticed other unexpected (non-stereotypical) areas where divisions tend to fall along gender lines?