Tuesday 27 January 2015

Today Was "Actually" a Good Day

This morning I had fun doing math. We warmed up with the "Sign Post" problem which I was all over trying to solve it mathematically, until someone figured it out with Google...this kind of sucked the fun out of doing the math, but I'll give HB credit for finding the solution albeit a little too easily for my liking. Check out http://www.agoogleaday.com/ for its daily puzzle that provides some more challenging work in using your search skills.

I made up part of a denominator in a chocolate bar problem at our Regional SIM session, and I'll admit I was a little stressed. As a "math guy" I feel that there is an expectation that I should be able to answer math problems quickly and correctly especially in front of 150 educators. I know I should be more comfortable with making mistakes, I just don't know anyone who WANTS to be wrong. So for participating I was rewarded with an 85% Cacao chocolate bar...a little bitter, but still yummy!

Things got a little hazy here for a while, but a slide deck referring to the optimization of a rectangular dog pen struck a chord with me. When explaining to a colleague what I was pondering they suggested I should ask other people. Alrighty I thought, lets tweet this to Grade 9 math teacher extraordinaire Kyle Pearce:
 Boo Yah! *Bonus - I just learned how to embed a tweet conversation into a blog.


On to exploring Grade 9-12 math tasks, and to be honest I was unimpressed. Perhaps it was my initial dismay, or thinking about the Dog Pen problem, or focusing on classifying the tasks in front of us, but I TOTALLY overlooked what appears to be a real gem.


The sum of two numbers is 28 and their product is 5. What is the sum of their reciprocals?
It wasn't until debriefing afterwards when a colleague pointed out this problem did I see what I had missed. This question is not a simple component of factoring a quadratic...so tomorrow I'm going to revisit this and see if I can figure out its solution. Also, thanks to MC for sharing about a teacher who let his class choose if he should use the mean, median, or mode to calculate their grade. What a great application idea for students!


In the afternoon we had some great sharing and discussion about what, as math coaches/numeracy facilitators, we had been working on with teachers in our boards and what we were seeing in their classrooms. Lots of good stuff happening and I promised that I'd share more of the resources I'm really enjoying for math instruction: * this is off the cuff, so I'll probably come back and update it more later. I'm still struggling with how best to curate.


Starters:
Estimation 180
Math Talks
Visual Patterns
Math Arguments
Graphing Stories
Would You Rather


Problems:
Bedtime Math (I really like the App, and so does my 5 year old daughter)
1001 Math Problems
Problem of the Week (CEMC)
YummyMath
NRICH


3-Act Tasks:
Dan Meyer
Geoff Krall
Kyle Pearce
Robert Kaplinsky


To wrap up our day seven of us were meeting for a social discussion when an impromptu game of Farkle broke out! It was the fist time playing for almost all of us, and it was a lot of fun, and a little competitive. Plus some really great mathematics discussions took place during the game, mostly focused on number sense for scoring and probability for making decisions. What is the probability of getting Farkled? Congrats to the birthday girl for winning.


To cap off the evening I was fortunate enough to experience firsthand a simple reminder why math is so important in real life:

Dinner Bill - $16.49
Drink Bill - $9.39
Total - $36.00 (calculated mentally by the waitress)


"Math never ends" - me



Monday 19 January 2015

Coffee Conundrum

What's wrong with this picture?
If you thought "hey, there's two pots but not even enough coffee to pour one cup" then we are on the same page. Terry Tate does a great job of reminding a coworker about proper coffee pot etiquette in this Reebok Office Linebacker commercial.

To be honest it's not a big deal, but what I'm really wondering is why does it get like this? I know some days are hectic and you grab a cup and go without having time to make another pot...no problem. For most of us I'm going to assume that this isn't the case, and my best guess is that it's because they may not know how. To be more specific, they may not feel comfortable for fear of making the coffee too strong or weak.

The goal of this post isn't to rant (maybe a little bit), it's to present a real world math problem with a meaningful solution, so let's get down to business.

What information do we need?

The coffee can label includes this recipe...



This very useful pitcher in the break room fills the coffee pot...

To make it quicker than using a tablespoon, we have this scoop for the coffee grounds...

How many scoops do we need to make a full pot of coffee?

*Extension: How much do we save by brewing our own coffee?

Saturday 10 January 2015

Cutting Up a Pineapple In 5 Steps (With Geometry)

A big shout out to @trianglemancsd whose blog, Talking Math With Your Kids, and his Which One Doesn't Belong is the inspiration for this blog post.

I think it's pretty cool that my 5 year old likes getting involved in the kitchen, so last week it wasn't a big surprise that she pulled out her ducky stool to see how I was going to cut up a pineapple.

Step 1: cut off the top and bottom

Me: What shapes did I make?
Layne: Circles.

Step 2: cut off the skin

Me: What shape do you see now?
Layne: ...a hexagon?
Me: Close, how many sides does it have?
Layne: Eight.
Me: What kind of animal has eight legs?
Layne: An octopus.
Me: Yeah, so what do you think the name of this 8 sided shape might be?
Layne: Octogon.

Step 3: cut into 8 segments

Me: Now what did we make?
Layne: Triangles!

Step 4: Cut the core off of each segement

Layne: Trapezoid!
(I don't even have to prompt for for this one)

Step 5: cut into bite size pieces and eat