INTERNATIONAL NETWORKING PROJECT ANNOUNCEMENT CONNECTING MATH TO OUR LIVES  CALL FOR PARTICIPATION

The flexible activities which follow are organized in categories from which teachers and students may choose. We encourage each class to participate in one introductory activity and one activity linking math to a social concern or issue of equality.

2. EVERYDAY MATH IN MY COMMUNITY (Product: Report describing an interview. Or alternatively, student-written math story problems based on the ways their families use math.) The students interview a relative or other adult in their community about how they use mathematics in their job, daily life, or studies. Encourage students to ask questions about the specific ways in which math is used, e.g. making calculations, handling money, creating budgets, taking measurements, analyzing numeric data, etc. Students then write a report or create math word problems for their peers based on the information they gathered.

3. AN IDEA OF YOUR OWN TO INTRODUCE YOURSELVES. Some classes will want to move right into the activities linking math to equity issues and social concerns. Feel free to send a brief message telling how math is taught at your school, and/or a successful or innovative math activity your class has done.

Another approach to this activity, which can be used successfully with students of any age, is for students or teachers to take informal opinion polls in their classes. Students tally the responses and calculate ratios or percentages. Then they describe in their own words, being as explicit as possible, the findings and implications. Finally they can create bar or pie graphs to represent and share their findings. Encourage students to address questions of concern to the school and community, analyze the responses by age, gender or other characteristics of the respondents, and write about their findings in the school newspaper.

5. PROMOTING EQUITY AT OUR SCHOOL SITE (Product: Report on the actions students have taken in their communities or schools to promote greater equity, including a brief summary of the data and analysis on which those actions were based.) Have students analyze all the biographies in the school library on the basis of gender, race, class or disability. Students then categorize these and use percentages, fractions, and bar graphs to help them describe the library's biography collection. After students have gathered the information and analyzed the collection, they can be encouraged to explore why the numbers are as they are. Assist your class in understanding how publishing and power work.

Next, ask students how they think and feel about the people and groups in the books and also how how their research influences the way they think about themselves. For example, when girls have gone through books and found only a certain number of women doing "important things", what does that say to them about themselves and what does that say to boys about their own importance? We can expand on that when we ask what does it mean when very few of the people, men or women are Latino, Asian, or African American.

Finally, students take action to address issues of representation at their school site. Encourage students to find out who has the power to make decisions about which books are selected for publication and which books are selected for purchase by the school. Students might write letters to educational publishers. They can also work with the librarian, administration, and the PTA, to encourage a more diverse collection of books and ensure that a broader range of educators, students, and community members are included in future decision-making. Variations include:

a. Students use CD ROM encyclopedias in their classrooms or
libraries to gather data on the length of the selections for many famous people, based on their gender, and race.

b. A group of students tours the school to collect and graph data on the images that appear on the school and classroom walls. Whose pictures and words are portrayed? Students analyze the data on the basis of gender, race, class or disability, comparing percentages of voices and images represented in each category with the population in their class, at their school site, in their state, and in their country.

c. Students analyze entire newspaper stories. They can outline
in one color all the stories about violence and crime, for example, and use another color to outline stories about people working for justice and peace. Similarly, one can highlight how many times people of color are featured in stories of crime or drug-addiction, and how many times they are portrayed positively.

d. Students look at front-page photos for one month in three major dailies to record what percentage of front-page photo subjects are women or people of color and when they do appear how they are represented, i.e. as athletes, criminals, victims, or representatives of government or business.

In each case, encourage students to use math skills of simple computation, averages, percents, and graphing to create displays on bulletin boards. Be sure to ask students to consider how these images affect the way they feel and how the decisions are made about which images or stories appear. Students can then take action against any inequities they might discover by writing to the newspapers or publishers and using their findings to teach younger children about the bias they detected.

6. AN IDEA OF YOUR OWN CONNECTING MATH TO YOUR DAY TO DAY LIVES AND TO THE BROADER SOCIETY