Making Curriculum Pop

Point (laughs) and counterpoints. It starts with this image from Facebook:

Then the Colbert clip -

Then an excellent counterpoint at Slate by University of Wisconsin math professor and author of How Not to Be Wrong Jordan Ellenberg. Somc excerpts...

People who teach math, like me, hate it when students ask us, “When am I going to use this?” We don’t hate it because it’s a bad question. We hate it because it’s a really good question, and one that our curriculum isn’t really set up to answer. And that’s a problem.
And then there’s the “number sentence.” OK, number sentences aren’t actually mentioned anywhere in the Common Core, and they’ve been part of the math curriculum for decades. They sound weird and unfamiliar, though, which makes them fair game for schools-these-days tsk-tsk-ery. A New York principal argued in the Washington Post that the number sentence concept was too sophisticated for young children. And Stephen Colbert mocked the phrase, suggesting that students should also have the option of using “a word equation or formula paragraph.”

Full blog is HERE.

He also embeds this classic Tom Lehrer video on "new math" from the 1960s.

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