This is boring! I don’t get this! What does this have to do with anyyythinng!!! Math teachers know these complaints all too well. English and history teachers can pull in movies, plays, and Socratic seminars, but math teachers are tasked with the real challenge of making content relevant.  

Wes, Albert’s Director of Content on the STEM side, has 10 years of experience teaching math, and he claims his students were never bored in his super exciting math classes.  (We’ll have to double check on that…)

Joking aside, Wes is passionate about making math “not not fun.” Below are some of the strategies he used to make math relevant to student’s lives.

Treat math as a puzzle to be solved.

Most math lessons are focused on the “let me just show you how to do it and then you repeat my actions over and over”. That’s like making someone watch you do a puzzle for the first time and then making them do it after you are done. You’ve already ruined the joy of finishing it.

Give a scenario that demonstrates the math involved and let kids discover the math themselves.

Example – For exponential functions, give students a scenario about a disease spreading and ask kids to make predictions. It helps them compare new concepts to old knowledge and better understand why this new math even exists. After they grasp the concept, then show them the trivial notation/formatting of how to write it formally.

Provide room for students to explain concepts and processes to each other.

While learning, everyone makes different connections with how math connects to real life to help them understand. The teacher may have a very formal and “correct” way of explaining a concept but often times students (especially those who struggled initially) will come up with other amazing ways to look at the problem that help other students make connections the teacher didn’t even think of.

Give students real work with errors.

Showing work with errors is a great way to teach students to reflect on their own thought process. Rather than just having students calculate the percent off a sale, or the tax on a bill, give them a receipt where a mathematical error is made. Rather than calculating how far away a ball will land, give students a problem where the ball lands too short of a target and they need to fix the calculations.

Showing work with errors is a great stepping stone to help students who may still struggle with where to start modeling a problem.

The structure is there for them to analyze and learn from while they are still learning about the concept and applying their knowledge.

Explain that math is more than just solving for a number: it’s about problem-solving skills in general.

Math is a great way to exercise the brain in decision making (which is a very important skill in life). Hefty math problems require you to hold and evaluate multiple pieces of information at once, determine their usefulness and judge their importance and then apply them to arriving at a solution (numerical or otherwise). This sort of decision making is required in any process: from a big decision like choosing a house/partner, to a trivial decision like choosing what meal to eat.

Happy math-ing!