Professional Development Around The World
Perhaps you have noticed eNews is a little late this month. Hopefully good things are worth waiting for though and you won't mind too much. The reason for the tardiness is simple. In the weeks since the previous issue I have been workshopping in UK, Sweden (a bit of an adventure to travel between the two without planes), Victoria and now this is issue is being finalised in Western Australia. The interest in the concept of all students learning to work like a mathematician in happy, healthy, cheerful, productive, inspiring classrooms is worldwide.
These Swedish teachers are being introduced to the Maths300 lesson Billiard Ball Bounces during a workshop evening on April 28 for Syd-SMaL, the southern group of the national mathematics teachers organisation. The workshop was titled (in Swedish):
Mikael (and the school) could do better in Algebra
If you have read (are reading) the Millenium Trilogy by Stieg Larsson (the whole world seems to be) then you might recognise this passage from Volume 2:
Blomkvist had never had any trouble doing calculations. He had left secondary school with the highest marks in maths, which in no way meant, of course, that he was a mathematician, only that he had been able to absorb the content of the school's curriculum.
Stieg Larsson, The Girl Who Played With Fire, Chapter 11
The promo for the workshop went on to claim:
Mikael Blomkvist succeeded at school .. and yet the school failed Mikael. Mikael had classmates who did not absorb the content of the school curriculum. The school failed them too. In this workshop for all primary and secondary teachers we will explore how the school could do better for Mikael and his classmates. Our mathematics will come from the areas of Pre-algebra and Algebra.
The 'billiard table' the teachers are using in the photo is made from 20cm squares of card. The path of the ball is traced by a length of string. We assume the ball is fired at an angle of 45°. The billiard table size can easily be changed.
If I tell you the dimensions of the billiard table, can you predict the number of bounces?
- Start with 3 x 6.
- What happens if we make it 3 x 7?
- Explore further with graph paper.
- Further still with Maths300 companion software for the lesson.
- If I tell you the dimensions of the billiard table, can you predict the corner the path will finish?
- What happens if we change the firing angle?
Half way through the workshop, examples like this had convinced the primary and secondary teachers present that Mikael (and the school) could indeed do better in algebra. So we just rolled on having heaps more fun together - and of course coffee together Stieg - with mathematics.
