Math for Every Subject: Build your Reusable Question, Math Templates, Sentence Stems and Math Prompts
If you teach, you teach math. You teach logic.
If you ascribe to the Multiple Intelligences Theory, or know that value of "old school" Learning Styles, you know that number sense and logic are thinking skills that need strengthening.
How may of your colleagues "gripe and complain that students "just don't think." What do you think they mean by that? Are your colleagues referring to a math and logic set of thinking abilities?
And, if you climb the Higher-Order Thinking ladder, analysis, application, synthesis and evaluation are "math-logic-heavy" thinking skills.
Sure, computation has been deprecated on high-stakes achievement tests, but questions related to…
- Reading Charts and Graphs
- Money, Time and Measurement
- Number Lines, Coordinates
- Estimation
- Geometry
- Patterns and Sequences
- Probability and Statistics
- Logic
- Sets and Matrices
- And, the ubiquitous "word problem"
are hammered home.
The Enlightened Response
So, what's a stressed, working-fingers-to-the-bone, free-time deficient teacher to do?
Carve out more time to teach math from the obviously wasted time found elsewhere in the school day? Scrape together time from excess downtime minutes?
No.
Address math systematically, continually during the entire school day.
Every Subject Relates to Math and Logic
Every subject relates to Math and Logic, so, work math and logic questions into every lesson.
What could be easier? "No, ignoring math and logic altogether is not an acceptable answer.
How to "Pull this Off"
Whatever your strategy of building a personal habit of including one (or more) math question in every lesson, the time to start building the habit is before school starts.
Start by building generic, reusable questions, sentence stems, problem templates and math question prompts.
Find ways to place reminders around the room, find ways to have student assistants remind you to ask the "Math Question of the Class Period."
The permutations and combinations for creating questions from the ten areas of math competency with eight types of intelligence is the Cartesian Product, i.e., each item matched with each other item. This gives us 80 possible combinations. If we have 80 possible combinations and seven classes per day, the Cartesian product is 80 times seven or 560 options.
These options are too numerous to list here.
Sidebar
Note, trick questions are also allowed. For example:
How old was President Bush when he fought in Viet Nam as a Swift Boat captain?
How many times did President Clinton lie to a Grand Jury before he was impeached?
How many times did Vice-President Gore invent the Internet?
What is the shortest distance between a lobbyist and the loss of public timberland if money must first pass through a Congress person's bank account?
How many strippers can dance on a table at the senator's 90th birthday party?
Let us know if you would like to see some of of the many generic math and logic examples?
