Making math relevent

One discussion we had in class last week was about making math relevant to students. So often we give students completely abstract or adult focused examples of how to use the mathematical idea we are attempting to teach and so often we completely lose our students to utter boredom and dislike of this “useless idea”. This is something I focused on while creating a lesson to teach with my dyad partner this last week. Our goal was to teach students different approaches to solving two-step word problems and help them to see that there are many ways to arrive at the same correct answer. For this lesson we could have stood up and taught straight from their textbook or the teacher’s curriculum guide. But, after looking at the direction the curriculum was going and the examples it wanted us to use, we realized this lesson would quickly become mundane and not applicable to our students. Therefore, we began our lesson by telling our students about a recent problem we had where we had to use math to solve and fix our problem. More simply, we told our students a real life story. Then, we helped them connect our story to the idea that math word problems are like real life problems where ordinary people need to use math to solve. We involved students in the word problem examples we used; all of the problems involved students’ names and were real problems that the students were or could be experiencing. We noticed that our students were highly engaged in solving these “problems” for their peers. When it came time to have students write their own real life word problems, they were excited at the chance to share a problem they had that involved math. We did not use silly stories. There was never an example like “There are two frogs in the pond, five frogs come to the pond and three frogs leave. How many frogs are left in the pond?” Who cares! Our students definitely do not. This is just one example of how we as teachers need to make our lessons applicable to our specific students.