Realizing that middle-grades students bring to classrooms different experiences that shape their meaning about mathematics, both from inside and outside the classroom, it seems that embracing culture...is one important way to address a need in schools - that is, high achievement in mathematics by all students. - Michaele Chappell and Denisse Thompson If your students can text like this: cul8r bff, they can solve for this: 3x+5=39+2x In the middle grades personal identity becomes more important to learning than ever. More than a decade of research tells us that effective school mathematics has to be relevant to the lives and cultures of every student. Chappell and Thompson bring you a unique and user-friendly teacher resource that incorporates popular media from a variety of cultures in rich and engaging math investigations. A wide range of math concepts - from algebraic thinking to number and operation, geometry to probability - are embedded within dynamic activities. Engage your media-savvy students with investigations from popular films, games, literature, and the internet. Connect your students to stories from African American, Latino, Asian, and Native American cultures. Activities are ready to use or customizable for your classroom. CD-ROM includes: 90+ reproducible investigations with answer keys available as customizable Word documents Quick-reference matrix that cross references the activities by the five content strands of the Principles and Standards for School Mathematics from the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics and by the four cultural groups. You can bring middle school math to life for all your students. This resource, ready to supplement your existing curriculum, shows you how and why to do it

Mathematics has maintained a surprising presence in popular media for over a century. In recent years, the movies Good Will Hunting, A Beautiful Mind, and Stand and Deliver, the stage plays Breaking the Code and Proof, the novella Flatland and the hugely successful television crime series NUMB3RS all weave mathematics prominently into their storylines. Less obvious but pivotal references to the subject appear in the blockbuster TV show Lost, the cult movie The Princess Bride, and even Tolstoy's War and Peace. In this collection of new essays, contributors consider the role of math in everything from films, baseball, crossword puzzles, fantasy role-playing games, and television shows to science fiction tales, award-winning plays and classic works of literature. Revealing the broad range of intersections between mathematics and mainstream culture, this collection demonstrates that even "mass entertainment" can have a hidden depth.

Mathematics teachers often struggle to motivate their students. One way to cultivate and maintain student interest is for teachers to incorporate popular media into their methodology. Organized on the subject strands of the Common Core, this book explores math concepts featured in contemporary films and television shows and offers numerous examples high school math teachers can use to design lessons using pop culture references. Outlines for lessons are provided along with background stories and historical references.

Mathematics teachers often struggle to motivate their students. One way to cultivate and maintain student interest is for teachers to incorporate popular media into their methodology. Organized on the subject strands of the Common Core, this book explores math concepts featured in contemporary films and television shows and offers numerous examples high school math teachers can use to design lessons using pop culture references. Outlines for lessons are provided along with background stories and historical references.

This book gives a remarkably fine account of the influences mathematics has exerted on the development of philosophy, the physical sciences, religion, and the arts in Western life.

We live in a world of numbers and mathematics, and so we need to work with numbers and some math in almost everything we do, to control our happiness and the direction of our lives. The purpose of Coming Home to Math is to make adults with little technical training more comfortable with math, in using it and enjoying it, and to allay their fears of math, enable their numerical thinking, and convince them that math is fun. A range of important math concepts are presented and explained in simple terms, mostly by using arithmetic, with frequent connections to the real world of personal financial matters, health, gambling, and popular culture.As such, Coming Home to Math is geared to making the general, non-specialist, adult public more comfortable with math, though not to formally train them for new careers or to teach those first learning math. It may also be helpful to liberal arts college students who need to tackle more technical subjects. The range of topics covered may also appeal to scholars who are more math savvy, though it may not challenge them.

Stanford mathematician and NPR Math Guy Keith Devlin explains why, fun aside, video games are the ideal medium to teach middle-school math. Aimed primarily at teachers and education researchers, but also of interest to game developers who want to produce videogames for mathematics education, Mathematics Education for a New Era: Video Games as a Med