My Life as a Mathematician

This week's prompt from Melanie is: Your Life as a Mathematician. When you're not at school are you still a mathematician? How do you use math to solve problems in your daily life? How did you use it today?

If you asked me 6 months ago the answer was unequivocally, “I am not”. As I looked around for ways to engage students in inquiring into maths concepts, rather than teaching them, I realised that we are all mathematicians. Perhaps not in the traditional Archimedes or Adam Spencer sense, but we all certainly use maths in our daily lives. As I looked for ways to improve my teaching of maths I forced myself to find reasons for knowing or understanding these concepts. If we aren’t going to use it in the world, or build on the understandings for some future purpose, than why learn it in the first place?

I started with the obvious … How much money will this cost, sometimes estimating, how much change will I receive? Walking through the isles of the supermarket shelves, which should I buy the big pack for $20 (56+6 dishwashing tablets) or the smaller one for $10 (22+8)? Calculating the time it will take to drive from home to the movies, what time should I leave to arrive with plenty of popcorn buying time to spare?

Then I moved on … I recently started running and wearing a Nike+ band, what distance did I run today, how long did it take me, how many calories was that, how many calories did I consume yesterday, am I in front or behind? Recently I’ve started twittering and blogging the stats I’m collecting are fantastic, Redesigning the kitchen and choosing the tiles I have been challenged with shape & space, patterns and measurement all in one – no wonder it is so hard to choose.

Grade five are working on volume and capacity, so I’m looking for areas in my own life where I am forced to apply these conceptual understandings: filling the fish tank or the pool, buying sand for the sand box, adding enough water to the saucepan to allow for the displacement of my artichokes (they were both enormous and delicious).

For me, the challenge to develop ways to facilitate inquiry has been resolved by looking for these concepts in the real world (which in turn becomes the challenge). From these real world examples I try to develop tasks that will give the students an opportunity to uncover the mathematical concepts through their discussions as they work collaboratively together. I agree it is hard, not to mention time consuming, but rewarding when you see the kids make sense of their learning. Learning about mathematical concepts in these ways, and understanding them myself, allows the students to develop their own purpose and application of the concepts. I always wondered how maths would be relevant to me outside of school – hopefully my students will develop this understanding while they are also developing the understanding of the concepts. Making the learning so much richer.

How do you use maths in your real world?