The Strategic School, Karen Hawley Miles.Stretching the School Dollar, Rick Hess.Why Don’t Students Like School, Daniel Willingham.Drive: The Surprising Truth about What Motivates Us, Daniel Pink.

Standing on the Shoulders of Giants, Marc S.

Teacher: The One Who Made the Difference, Mark Edmundson.

Unfortunately, teaching math from a children’s book is not possible…or is it? With questions like “What is the next number in the sequence 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13?” and “Which tastes greater? a) 1/2 a pizza b) 1/2 an apple pie,” the book has problems for the whole family, introducing algebra, logic, and everyone’s favorites, fractions.The Math Curse succeeds where so many math textbooks have failed, connecting the math content to daily experiences younger readers recognize and older readers recall. Fibonacci (a little math humor there), sets the heroine off on a journey where she begins to see everything in her life as math. Math Curse starts with every math teachers’ favorite phrase, “You know, you can think of almost everything as a math problem.” The statement, made by the heroine’s math teacher Mrs. Yet you don’t have to be a math aficionado to love the book’s hands-on approach and connection to everyday life. We recorded their episodes with a flip camera and put them together with iMovie.As a former middle school math teacher and a man whose wife lovingly calls a “math nerd,” my enjoyment of Math Curse by Jon Scieszka and Lane Smith (Viking Press, New York, 1995) should come as no surprise.

Decided on a math problem they wanted to demonstrate and solve.

I had shown them previously a video from the Common Craft Show “ Wikis in Plain English” and we decided to base the math episodes on their type of explanations and filming style. In groups, they worked on a storyline to create their own “Math Curse” episodes. Inspired by the story, the students looked around our school and started seeing that math indeed is all around us. Finally, she is left painstakingly calculating how many minutes of “math madness” will be in her life now that she is a “mathematical lunatic.” A class treat of cupcakes becomes a study in fractions, while a trip to the store turns into a problem of money. As the narrator slowly turns into a “math zombie”, everything in her life is transformed into a problem.

Next comes the mathematical school of probability, followed by charts and statistics. The book, which is told by a nameless female student, begins with a seemingly innocent statement by her math teacher- “you know, almost everything in life can be considered a math problem.” The next morning, the heroine finds herself thinking of the time she needs to get up along the lines of algebra.

The plot summary of the book from Wikipedia describes it nicely: Z’s 4th & 5th grade math class read the book “The Math Curse” by Jon Scieszka and illustrated by Lane Smith.

The math curse