Math Around the World

Every semester I invite a group of International students studying at St. Mike's to come to my math education class to be interviewed by my students. The purpose of the activity is for my students to realize that math is not the same the world over and that they will be faced with procedural math problems that they might not, at first, understand.

This semester we met with a group of students from China, Japan, Congo, Saudi Arabia and Spain. Using the Multicultural math interview i have developed over the years for my research my students got to know the math of a variety of countries from around the world. There was much laughter from both my students and the International students when they showed each how they did, for example,  subtraction problems or multiplication problems. They were also fascinated by the numbers that have significance in each culture. The international students from China had no idea that 13 was unlucky in the the US and the US students had no idea that 4 was an unlucky number in most Asian languages because the word for four sounds like the word for death.

One of the great bi-products of this experience is that the international students get to meet more SMC students on campus which helps them feel more at home as they go about their studies. I was once an international student, in 1977, and know what it's like to be i a new land with new methods, social expectations and, yes, a different language. It was George Bernard Shaw who said that the UK and US are two countries separated by a common language. You should have seen the look on the students faces when I asked where the rubber was so I could erase the chalk board!

Math and English Language Learners

I started teaching a new course today, GED611 Teaching Mathematics to English Language Learners in the K - 8 Classroom . The topic of the course, a new requirement in the TESOL Program at St. Mike's, is the focus of my research during the past six years and is something for  which I have great enthusiasm and endless stories to tell,  as the student will tell you.

When I teach a math course I always have manipulative materials on the tables so that students have something to "doodle" with. It's not at all distracting and gives the students an opportunity to learn the characteristics of the math tools we use. Today, when I went to get my box of some 500 Unifix cubes (see picture) I found someone had put all the same colors together in rows of 15 or so. I was quite amazed by this since they are always just jumbled in the box the way they are in the picture. So, a little miffed, I gave lengths of  blues to some students, red to others and greens and so on until all 6 students had several colored rows in front of them.

After class I relayed the strange situation to a couple of my colleagues one of whom was able to shed light on the mystery. Apparently, a student in an earlier summer course needed something to do during class and so had methodically organized the Unifix cubes into colored lines. It must have taken several hours of class time to do this with so many cubes.

The class, just one graduate credit, got off to a great start and I'm very much looking forward to working with the students for the rest of the week. 

A Busy, Busy Week

It's been a busy week. I finally completed and submitted my third manuscript of the year for review for publishing in the TESOL journal. TESOL (Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages) is the international organization for anyone interested in working with students who are English language learners (ELLS). I also had a paper on the same subject accepted at the TESOL conference in New Orleans in March.


Yesterday I was invited to join the Vermont Developmental Disabilities Council. This is a volunteer position with quite an extensive time commitment; minimally 4 full-day conferences a year plus committee work. I need to find out more about the organization before committing to it. There is still so much advocacy work to do in the field of special education especially at the high school level where students with special needs still do not receive the same opportunities to have "rich and interesting" learning experiences as other students do. The Life Skills curriculum comprising things like making beds, shopping and cooking still tends to dominate the high school experience for students with special needs which is quite depressing. As important as these things are they are more the responsibility of the family rather than the school.

My first webinar has been postponed indefinitely which is a relief. Trying to work out exactly how these things work is quite the challenge so to have as much time as I need to get a handle on things is a great help.

Next Monday I'll be helping out at a statewide conference on teaching math to students with special needs and on Tuesday, November 9 I present a paper at the annual ATMNE (Association for Teachers of Mathematics in New England) in Nashua, N.H. All these things are very typical activities of college professors everywhere and are important ways that we enhance our own teaching as well as our academic fields in general.

It's also been a busy week for Andrew Jumonville, one of my brothers-in-law who's commissioned life-sized bronze statue of Abraham Lincoln, Jesse Fell and David Davis will be unveiled outside the Center for Performing Arts in Bloomington, Illinois this weekend. Andrew has a great sense of humor and if you look closely you'll see that each of the three men in the statue is making rock, paper, scissors with one of his hands. You can't see it in the picture but there's also the word "rabbit" and a bee in the hat you can see. The picture shows Andrew in front of the statue outside the Bloomington Performing Arts Center in Illinois.