Talk:Folk Math





Comment by David Moursund 3/29/08
This article on Folk Math is one of the best math education articles that I have ever read. I believe its basic premise is applicable to a number of other areas in our formal precollege educational system.

Think in terms of our formal school system and the teaching/learning in any discipline. To a very large extent, this is a top down approach to education, with content and teaching practices being determined by "experts" in the field.

Contrast this with the the Internet 2 (bottom up) approach to activities such as the Wikipedia, Facebook, Flickr, and other Social Networking projects where the people creating the content and the people who are using the content. Think in terms of computer games with millions of users interacting with each other in a game environment, often function within a team of users to solve problems and accomplish tasks. Think in terms of "just in time" education, where a person learns what they need to know to handle a particular problem or task at the time they have need for said knowledge and skills.

Comment by David Moursund 10/2/08)
Today the number of visitors to the Folk Math page hit the 1,000 number. I am impressed!

Congratulations, Gene.

Comment by Megan Smallwood (10/17/08)
I was very intrigued by the section of this article about, “Math Folks Do.” This really should be the basis for all math teaching, teaching math that students will actually use in their everyday lives. So much time in school is spent on text book math problems and ideas that have no correlation to the student’s lives or experiences. Teachers want their students to be curious about math and want to learn how it works, but in order for that to happen we have to get away from doing problems out of the book and into letting students learn math through exploration. Students who have the opportunity to figure out math problems using manipulatives and working on solving real life problems with a group not only enjoy math more, but also gain a deeper understanding of the process. I have started using the Investigations math series in my Kindergarten classroom this year. This program sounds a lot like the Folk Math program described here, with hands-on math using real world problems. Since I have begun using this program, the students have really started thinking more about math and how it works. I had a students come in yesterday and tell me that her mom asked her how many shoes she had, so she counted the left shoes and then the right and added them together to get the answer. Many kids could do an addition problem like this out of a text book and get the correct answer, but the thinking behind her reason to count and then add the two sums really shows her underlying knowledge of the math process. Implementing programs that focus on real world application, problem solving, and using manipulatives for hands on learning expand a student’s understanding of math concepts. This year I hope to instill in my students a curiosity about math and the understanding of math as a real world application through doing math that “real folks” do.

Comment by Sonja McKelvy 10/21/08 (EDT 630)
I was immediately grabbed by the title of this article! The idea of "folk math" as the math that people do in their walk-a-day worlds is a great one. Dave Moursund asked if the concept of folk math has made any headway into math instruction. I feel that it has made a difference in elementary math classrooms. I love math and enjoy teaching it to my students, so I have aggressively pursued math workshops from my first (Math Their Way) to Marilyn Burns to NCTM (National Council of Teachers of Mathematics) Conferences to AMSTI (Alabama Math, Science, and Technology Initiative). All of these have emphasized the importance of developing mental math skills in young thinkers. One workshop even began with an exercise where we, the teachers, read through a list of "real world" mathematical situations and had to identify whether we would solve each using pencil/paper, mental math, or a calculator. Mental math won hands down! Several of these approaches to mathematics teaching also encourage the use of student math journals where students write about their thought processes and are allowed to solve problems in their own ways. The AMSTI materials (Investigations in Number, Data, and Space) even encourage students to create their own algorithms for solving problems. Finally, these approaches all make use of playing math games to teach mathematical concepts and problem solving. My favorite way to begin math instruction in my classroom is to share the book Math Curse by Jon Sciesaka with my students. It begins with a statement from the teacher, "You know, you can think of almost everything as a math problem."

And we go from there trying to make what we do in the math classroom relevant to the lives of the students at that moment, not at some mystical "someday you'll need to use this".