Do the Math

I was sitting at my desk,  Zoom-working when I heard from the other room;

"Ugh, guess what the idiot said now!?"

So I yelled back:

"I don't even want to know- but ok what did Trump say?"

Reading from the paper, Hiro continues, "the idiot has made five dozen false claims about mail balloting since April"

DO THE MATH- I suggest- so after looking at the calendar and counting how many days have elapsed since April, Hiro announces that the idiot has lied at least once a day since April .  And that's just lies about the Post office mind you!

The Math looks like this

12 days in a dozen

5 dozen x12= 60

30(ish) days in a month

2 months have elapsed

60 divided by 60 

=

one lie a day about mail in ballots.

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***

I've been working on a games book for kids for a while (as some of you already know).  Most of these word games were originally written to be played on train or bus commutes with your kid but now that we are sequestered in our homes and staying away from public transportation, I've been rethinking these games.  The following used to be the preface to the Math games section:

I teach in an art school. Two actually—I’m an adjunct.  Many of my students hate math. That’s why they are in art school, where SAT scores do not determine their futures. But then, I teach them how to make stuff. I teach them how to make stuff stand up and sometimes hold not only its own weight, but an external weight. They get scared because deep down inside, when they have to make something that is constructed out of a rectangular cube or a truss system out of equilateral triangles, they know math is somehow involved.

 

I have to build their confidence. First, I tell them that in high school, I was good at math and could have gone all the way through AP Calculus if I hadn’t been a slacker. I understood the concepts hiding in the Pythagorean triangles, but what is the point of proving that a shape that is obviously a triangle to be a triangle. I found geometry class to be asinine. I think my students relate better to someone who got a C+ in Geometry than a math whiz. Then I share that what I’ve learned in all these years of teaching is that being good at math is more than knowing equations and memorizing tables. It’s more important to comprehend the world spatially, to be able to recognize patterns. If you play music, you intrinsically understand fractions. If you can read a map, you understand coordinates. If you wait tables, you understand the value of money and calculating percentages. This is what math is. These games will hopefully teach these same lessons and be fun to play as you navigate around the city with your child.

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This is a game from that chapter:

The Math Curse

Our New Common Core Math has joined real estate and restaurants as one of the top subjects of party conversation for parents of public school students. No matter what grade your child is in—even kindergarten! —you will have to learn to do a lot of ridiculous word problems in a workbook called Go Math or something similar. This is where Common Core really enters your world. The week my son brought home the Go Math workbook was the same week we discovered Jon Scieszka and Lane Smith’s book The Math Curse.

 

From the same wacky pair who created The Stinky Cheese Man, The Math Curse uses humor to tackle the serious subject of math and entice children to focus on the trickiest of equations. The book’s fictional narrative begins when the math teacher, Mrs. Fibonacci, tells a young boy that “almost everything can be thought of as a math problem.” Thus begins the “math curse.” Mathematical questions are disguised in history, art, P.E., and even how to divide birthday cupcakes. Smith’s masterpiece of layout and design enhances Scieszka’s story. It uses surreal, collage-like illustrations combined with a dizzying variety of fonts to create diagrams, charts, and multiple-choice quizzes with the answers as silly as the questions. This smart and entertaining book is for every child who dreads math, and every parent frustrated by Common Core.

 

***

And here is another from that chapter specifically written to be played on trains:

Everyday Math

 

I was six when I moved to this country from Japan and I fit the stereotype: pigtailed with crooked teeth, bespectacled, brainy, and ahead in math by at least three grades. This was back in the day when you could excel with numbers even if you didn’t know how to speak, read, or write in English. Recently, I asked one of my Chinese students who had come to this country during high school as an exchange student if she was ahead in math when she entered high school here. She said she wasn’t. I realized then that the new math being taught in American schools is not the same as the math I grew up with. Now math is a whole new monster that has to be mastered through the English language. Math is not about memorizing numbers, tables, or equations. Math is dependent on how well you can read. This new emphasis on literacy puts math in the context of the everyday world. This game builds on that concept.

***

So now that we are avoiding going outside to find math equations, I've been looking at the newspaper where you can make-up thousands of games you can play with your kid. Just the number of lies told in one day can probably be contained in a math workbook for the entirety of a Go Math workbook. 

***

Another idea would be to make a math workbook focusing on social change with word problems using the messed up history of our country. An example problem might look like this:

Number of slaves kidnapped from Africa

and shipped to the US (between 1620-1866)

=472,381

Number of  slaves in the US (according to the 1860 census) 

= 3,953,762

Cotton made up 60% of the US export 

equal to $200 million a year (in the years leading up to the Civil War) 

Which equals $6,178,048,192. in today's amount.

How much back pay (in dollars) would each slave be owed today?

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And finally...

The following graphs on current Covid cases caught my eye this morning:

Just at first glance the number of new corona cases seem pretty equal between Georgia, Illinois and New York.  However if you look at the numbers on the left, Georgia's cases is counted in 1,000 person increments, while Illinois is counted in 4,000 and New York in 10,000.  I'm not sure if this was an issue of space in the paper, but really they should have put all of the states on one graph to really show the proportion per state. 

So here's a Math exercise for the weekend: Change the numerical increments of new cases to 100 people per state, change the color of each state and overlay them on top of one another.  This could be an art project as well... full on STEAM ahead!