Letting Go

By Mica Angela Hendricks and daughter

My dear friend, Rachel Wynne, kindly emailed me the link I am about to share. It’s a blog post called “Collaborating with a Four-Year Old”. I just love it. It’s about a mom and her young daughter creating artwork together. The pictures are priceless, and the ideas about sharing and collaboration are profound.

“Those things you hold so dear cannot change and grow and expand unless you loosen your grip on them a little.” - Mica Angela Hendricks, The Busy Mockingbird

Geometry Daily

http://geometrydaily.tumblr.com/

I love the images on this website. A new one is created daily and generously shared with the world. I would like to use these with students. The only prompt would be, simply, “What do you see?”

Marjorie on Math Munch

There’s a great blog called Math Munch. I mentioned it in a previous post, but I have to revisit it here. I’ve signed up to receive new posts from Math Munch via email, something I don’t usually do. But I’ve found that this is worth the space in my inbox. Each post has a few different topics, everything from cool paper folding projects to high quality videos and online games. You must check it out!

The current Math Munch post includes a piece about a woman named Marjorie Rice who became interested in tesselations and discovered some new ones on her own. These pictures are from her website. What’s great about this story is that a) she’s a woman, b) she didn’t have a math background beyond high school, and c) she was curious, worked at something, and found enjoyment and success.

I won’t go on and on here, but the other two stories with Marjorie’s in this issue of Math Munch are equally worth reading.

The pictures I’ve included here are some of Marjorie’s tesselations.

Music for the Eyes

Joe Garofalo, C.P. Smith music teacher and captain in the Lyric Theater’s recent production of Titanic, kindly shares his room with me. Often, before the students arrive in the morning, we find ourselves discussing the math-music connection and how we might help bring this to life for students. Last week, Joe showed me some animated music he’d discovered. I had a hard time tearing myself away. See for yourself. Here is Johann Sebastian Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D Minor  by a company called Musanim. Musanim says it will send a free DVD of these videos to public libraries and schools. We’ve got ours on order.

A Pickle

There are some interesting new websites out there. One is called Math Pickle. Shannon Walters, C.P. Smith Library Guru, alerted me to this one. So far, I like most of what I’ve seen on this site, although the layout is a bit clunky. Dr. Gordon Hamilton presents activities for students based on math problems dating back several decades to mathematicians like Issai Schur and Lothar Collatz. His decision to put young Vi Hart on the same page as some of the older mathematics greats is a good sign. Math activities are presented via video, and include footage of real students. I’m less impressed with Dr. Hamilton’s philosophizing about the way math should be taught in a video entitled “Let’s Abolish Elementary Mathematics”, even though I agree with most of what he is saying.

I like the Graceful Tree Conjecture as a means of practicing subtraction with third graders and the Collatz Conjecture for fourth graders. These are captivating problem-solving activities which are an excellent way to encourage students to work together, discuss different strategies, practice skills, check their work, and have fun. I would also try the magic cauldrons addition game for second graders. Teachers will find Math Pickle a useful site for finding new activities for math class and getting a thorough explanation of how to use them.

Making Math More

Woman sewing quilt : New York World's Fair, 1939-1940. NYPL

Did you know there is a new museum in New York City called the Museum of Mathematics (or MoMath for short)? They say the grand opening will be in 2012 at 11 East 26th Street in Manhattan. I am hoping to visit it over April vacation.

For now, we've got MoMath guru George Hart's Math Monday column in MAKE Magazine. Here's a nice piece on quilting and geometry. Check it out. You and your students could try building octiamonds with pattern blocks if you aren't a big quilter.

Math and Image

Lately, I’ve been thinking about the role of images in mathematics. When it was time to create fliers for upcoming elementary school Math Nights, I decided to forgo the usual clip art. I used some mathematical images, including Sierpinski’s Triangle and a fractal tree like the one shown here. I’m happy with the way the fliers turned out.

Professor Tim Whiteford blogged about these fliers and more in a post entitled “Sierpinski and the Joys of Learning Math”. Says Tim, “...communicating the aesthetic component of math, [is] a critically important element if we are ever going to help students enjoy math for what it is, the science of pattern. Imagine learning to read and write without poetry, fiction, literature and creative writing? Imagine if the only thing we learned in language arts was the ability to read directions and write formal descriptions? Imagine if reading and writing were reduced to a purely utilitarian function?”

Teachers often use more than words and numerals to teach mathematics. They incorporate image and structure by encouraging students to work with manipulatives, make towers, draw tesselations, and create patterns. In light of this good work, should we continue to explore creative ways of teaching math? I think so.

Matthew Peterson discusses how language can get in the way of math in his TED talk called “Teaching Math Without Words”. In this 8 minute video we get a glimpse of a software program designed to show math with pictures. I found the software visuals intriguing, as are other apps and interactive math websites (i.e. a Tetris-like game called Factor-tris). As I watched the video, I found myself wanting to defend the role of language and dialogue in mathematics education but Matthew beat me to it. He shared a poignant story about a student with autism finding richer language as a result of his work with the math program.

A great companion to Matthew Peterson is Temple Grandin’s “The World Needs All Kinds of Minds”. If you haven’t read her book, Thinking in Pictures, you can get the gist in this 16 minute TED Talk. Temple mentions math, saying “You see, the autistic mind tends to be a specialist mind. Good at one thing, bad at something else. And where I was bad was algebra. And I was never allowed to take geometry or trig. Gigantic mistake. I'm finding a lot of kids who need to skip algebra, go right to geometry and trig.” Temple is one of my heroes. I love what she has to say about her visual thinking and I love the embroidery on her quirky western shirts.