Math teachers: What if you could use the colorful stories of comic books to teach multiplication, prime numbers, and linear equations? Would you?No, we're not dumbing education down, not at all.
What's that you say? You don't think there are any comics-based materials for math? You say you're jealous of your language arts and social studies colleagues when they use smash-hit graphic novels like Smile, Dog Man, and Maus? You envy your science colleagues when they reach for books like The Manga Guide to Physics and The Cartoon History of the Universe?
Most math teachers don't think that engaging, visually appealing books like these are an option for them.
"Are things like that really out there?" said Brandi Green, who teaches math at Sharon-Mutual High School in rural Mutual, Okla. "Because I'd love to use them."
In the past 15 years, comic books and their longer cousins, graphic novels, have hit the big time in language arts and social studies classes and, to a lesser degree, in science. But they're just now tiptoeing into math classrooms.
Education, politics, and anything else that catches my attention.
Thursday, September 26, 2019
The New New New Math!
If only they'd thought of this back in 1957, when the Sputnik scare galvanized mathematicians to create the first "new math":
Don't you remember PS magazine and how effective it was with the soldiers?
ReplyDelete(If you need a memory jog: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PS,_The_Preventive_Maintenance_Monthly )
I had forgotten about that.
ReplyDeleteI do remember other cartoon-like documents for soldiers, but the army was always about KISS. High school shouldn't be! Especially upper level math.