The Geometry students at Bowlegs love to be able to relate math to real life and geometry really "fits the bill". We talk about geometry in construction, the energy industry, and just "teenage" life like sports and driving.
The school is definitely in the 90% range of the poverty level as it is a rural town school.
The HS math dept. ("me") only gets to work there 1/2 days through educational grant money to bring remediation math to these kids. The students like most kids don't notice things like that and just approach life with a sense of wonder and quickness that we all remember and wish we had.
My Project
Currently we are using some 6 year old books and a shower panel as a whiteboard. Geometry can be great fun with hands on learning, but currently I only get to do a bit of that by bringing in my own paper and cutting it into shapes and having them work with it. I am requesting materials that will allow the kids to come up to the whiteboard and use the shapes to really experiment with geometry instead of just visualizing most days. They will have shapes to learn all the proofs and fundamentals of triangles, polygons, parallelograms, angles, and segments, "oh, my!!!" It is something we are all looking forward to.
We ask math students for years to trust us that they will need math every day.
Geometry is one of the main math subjects that proves that statement. If we must ask them to "pretend" we have a CAD program in front of us to layout a garden, vs. having shapes for the garden on the whiteboard where teams can actually lay it out; it makes a huge difference in their perception of usefulness, their ability to grasp the concepts, and their "hopefully" continued use in math studies and application.
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