There are 12 Days in a Week!

I have a really wonderful group of students in my Math and Diversity class this semester. All 13 of them seem to revel in the aha moments that happen with great frequency as we explore the wonders of teaching math to students with diverse needs.

There are fiver areas of diversity identified in the course, each with their own particular set of characteristics that need to be considered. The five areas are teaching math to students who are English learners, students who have special needs, students who have a math disability, students in poverty and students who are high fliers. We've just completed the first area where we explored math and the WIDA standards, SIOP and wonderful things like comprehensive input. We even interviewed a group of international students to find out what the math they had learned was like and to explore some of the numerical aspects of their cultures.

Each class comprises an exploration of one of math such as numeracy and one aspect of one of the areas of diversity. Last week we explored place value and completed activities designed to get students to think more deeply about place value than they have ever done so before. We finished up by exploring different bases which is where there were so many aha moments. By the end of the session all the students were able to say why how there could be 12 days in a week and 202 weeks in a year. This is absolutely true if you are using base 5. 12 is "one-two" and not 12 so it is two 1s and one 5 which is 7 in base 10 . 202 is two 1s, no 5s and two  25s which is 52 in base 10.