Disneyland just ended their Forever Fireworks show. Beyond enjoying the fireworks and projected show, have you ever asked yourself, "What Math is involved in this?"
The first time that I watched the show I was amazed at all of the mathematics necessary for the show. Stop for a second and think about all of the mathematical factors that go into a place like Disneyland. When I think about the future "Emagineers" that we are educating today, I wonder what marvel they are going to create for our tomorrow. How do the Mathematical Practices that we are developing in our students relate to places like Disneyland? Do you wonder like I did, if students would be able to connect their daily learning to the world around them?
Could you highlight and/or find the Mathematical Practices in this video?
Make sense of problems and persevere in solving them
Reason abstractly and quantitatively
Construct viable arguments an critique the reasoning of others
Model with Mathematics
Use appropriate tools strategically
Attend to precision
Look for and make use of structure
Look for and empress regularity in repeated reasoning
During the spring of 2016 our sky in Riverside was given a rare display of mathematical brilliance by
the Air Force Thunderbirds. While I looked in the sky I could not help to think about the hyperbolas, parabolas, circles, ellipse, planes, angles, etc that I was seeing. The topic that my students were investigating during the time of the show was conics. Would students find solving a system of conics more interesting if they understood the importance in these planes not intersecting. As teachers could we provide more meaning to our Teaching Practices if we looked at them through the lens of the crowd drawing shows that we go to each year. Where is your favorite place to go and what mathematics is necessary for you to enjoy it?
Mathematics Teaching Practices include:
Establish mathematics goals to focus learning
Implement tasks that promote reasoning and problem solving
Use and connect mathematical representations
Facilitate meaningful mathematical discourse
Pose purposeful questions
Build procedural fluency from conceptual understanding
Support productive struggle in learning mathematics
Elicit and use evidence of student thinking
In the comment sections, we would LOVE for you to share your thoughts:
Did your students give you insight to the mathematics that they saw in the Forever Fireworks Display or Thunderbirds show? What mathematics did you uncover in watching these? What Mathematics Practices or Mathematics Teaching Practices do you see as most necessary for our students to be successful in a future career?
What if you became the "Meaningful Monday Math Teacher"? What if on Mondays' your warm up was to present a video for students to stop and be marveled by the mathematics that is in the world all around them? What is you favorite math video?
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