Math – Applications for Living: The Point of It

In my Math – Applications for Living class, a couple of students did something humorous (and sad) with a problem on a quiz yesterday.

Here is the problem:

Computer sales for a certain company were reported to be $40.3 million in 2009.  This was stated to be a 12% increase over the prior year.  Find the computer sales for 2008 (round to the nearest tenth of a million).

We are working on translating a percent change to a multiplying factor (1.12 in this case), and most students are not there yet.  However, here is the thing these particular students did:

40,000,000.3   is ‘40.3 million’

I have not talked to these students about what led them to make this mistake; it looks like they think that ‘.3’ means that part is stuck after the decimal point.  Since we just started working with scientific notation, that type of error will be a large issue.

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Mathematical Literacy: Growing Pains?

I am sharing some of the experiences in offering our new Mathematical Literacy course here at Lansing CC (Math105); we have 2 sections of the class, and I’ll be sharing from my section in general.

A normal class day (2 hours, twice per week) involves about 50 minutes of small group work.  The text we are using (a class test of the Almy and Foes Math Lit text) organizes the lessons around this approach; the group work is well designed, and the authors even include time estimates for each activity.  We usually cover 2 lessons per day, and the pace is reasonably comfortable for students.  I experience more stress about the pace than students, because that normal class day involves 4 separate small group activities followed by sharing results and often completed by whole-class discussion or lecture.

Tuesday, we dealt with a problem that involved megabytes and gigabytes … and a conversion between those units.  Each group had people who thought that a gigabyte was exactly 1000 megabytes, and each group had somebody who checked this with their phone using an internet search to provide the correct value (1024).  I was hoping this would happen, though I did not mention the possible problem; the text did not mention a possible need to search for an answer.  We used this problem to introduce a ‘multiply or divide’ approach to converting units; simultaneously, we are building our understanding of rates so we can use the more sophisticated process later.

Yesterday, we had a salary simulation with two different plans for raises; the groups did a lot of numerical work with the two plans and several cases, and discussed how we could tell when one option would be better than the other in a given case.  We then made a transition to writing algebraic expressions as a template for the numeric work, and showed a little bit of combining like terms.  I used these expressions to create a spreadsheet for the example salaries, and also showed the process on a graphing calculator.  Most students did not have a computer to bring to class, and only a few had a graphing calculator yet;  this is one issue that we will have to deal with soon, as a phone or smart phone is not a good device for doing mathematics (especially when we need to proctor tests).

Attendance is a little strange, because it is clear that most students do actually enjoy the work in class; most days, I am only getting about 70% attendance, which is low for my classes.  Since we have a test in two weeks, the absences are a concern.  I don’t think the students in this class have a significantly different lifestyle than my beginning algebra classes, where I normally have 80% to 90% attendance.  This is a puzzle.

The largest problem so far is doing homework.  Assignments include just 6 to 10 problems in the printed textbook, and (usually) another 6 to 10 in the online homework system.  This is pretty light, and we talked in class about the importance of studying for learning … to include these steps.  Only a few students are doing anything outside of class (5 or fewer, out of 18).  This has led me to modify the participation point strategy for each class — starting with the next class, students will lose half of their ‘daily’ points if they do not complete the assignments.  I’ll check the text problems during the first group time, and the online system before class.  I’ll report on how that goes in a couple of weeks.

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Math Lit: A Good First Week!

We started our Math105 (Mathematical Literacy) course this week — two sections, with about 40 students at this point.  As a first impression, I would say that the course is off to a good start based on the experience in the first 2 class meetings.

Our instructional design involves routine use of groups; each day has learning of new material based on each group dealing with information and questions.  The Math Lit textbook does a good job of providing the framework for this learning, and students seem to be adjusting well to a math class that is very different.  A central theme in class (group work and whole class work) is ‘reasoning’ both quantitatively and generally.  This aspect of the course seems to be especially well matched to student needs, though it is not always comfortable for them.

As an example of this reasoning, we had a lively discussion in class about the phrases “at most” and “at least”.  The problem had qualitative categories such as rarely, never, sometimes, etc; many students thought that any question about the information should be phrased with exactly the same vocabulary as the categories.  Some students thought that the range of category question like we did was too ambiguous, and argued passionately for a different interpretation of them.

The content we are covering is already more diverse than our ‘traditional’ courses — we have done ordered pairs and coordinate systems, rates, scatterplots, and fraction concepts.  So far, this diversity is being well received by the students.  In some ways, students are doing better than we might expect for this level of a course (somewhat equal to a beginning algebra course in rigor).

One thing I’ll mention as a nice tool:  a group quiz.  The second class day, we started with a quiz taken in the same groups that we are using for learning; they were expected to discuss each problem and agree on a shared answer, and the problems included some small extensions of what they had experienced.  After collecting the quiz, I asked the class what they thought of doing a quiz like that — the first response was “This helped us learn better.”  My conjecture is that the discussions in the groups allows students a lower-stress way to discover the things not understood.

Like I said … a good first week, and a good start on a new course!

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Math Lit LCC: Mathematical Literacy course at Lansing CC

My College is implementing a Mathematical Literacy course, beginning this semester.  I am teaching one of the two sections, with a colleague (a project ACCCESS fellow) doing the other class.  In case this would be of interest, I am planning on writing a post most weeks about the experience of teaching a course that is so different from the traditional curriculum.

As a curricular design issue, this Math Lit course (Math105) will serve as one of the math prerequisite options for 3 existing math courses for degrees (business math, art of geometry, and math – applications for living), and as a prerequisite option for a new statistics course the department is developing.  Students will have a choice to either take the traditional beginning algebra course or take this new Math Lit course.

We will be using the “Math Lit” textbook by Kathy Almy and Heather Foes, in a class test format.  Some of my weekly posts will relate to the use of this text, though I hope to talk more generally about mathematical literacy with a focus on the reasoning (algebraic and other) that the students will encounter

Our course, and the Math Lit textbook, are true to the design in the New Life model for the course called Mathematical Literacy for College Students (MLCS).  Although similar to the Quantway I course, the MLCS course is more flexible within the curriculum … we will have 4 math courses which follow our Math Lit course.  Also, the MLCS content is a bit more aligned with the basic mathematical ideas and values among math faculty; this is not saying that MLCS is traditional — it is not.  Rather, the observation is that more faculty will be able to be enthused about teaching MLCS, and MLCS can fit into our curriculum quite nicely.

Our classes start on January 14, with 2 class sessions per week.  I’ll post a “how did the start go” type of note after the class has met twice.  I hope you find the posts on this course enjoyable and/or helpful!

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