Playing with Math excerpt - The New York Times

Playing with Math

Stories from Math Circles, Homeschoolers, and Passionate Teachers

Edited by Sue VanHattum

Delta Stream Media, an Imprint of Natural Math

Seized by a Good Idea, by Stephen Kennedy, was originally published in Math Horizons, April 2003, as The Math Circle. Reprinted with permission. Copyright the Mathematical Association of America. All rights reserved.

Fantastic Four, by Pat Murphy, Lori Lambertson, Pearl Tesler, and the Exploratorium, was originally published in The Math Explorer: Games and Activities for Middle School Youth Groups. Reprinted with permission. Copyright the Exploratorium. All rights reserved. For more information, see exploratorium.edu.

Battleships?, Candyland?, LEGO?, M&Ms?, Monopoly?, Polydron?, Slinkie?, and Yahtzee? are registered trademarks.

This book is dedicated to Seymour Papert,

author of Mindstorms, creator of the Logo programming language for kids, and advocate for environments where students can

take charge of their own learning.

Illustrations Cover: Ever Salazar Interior: Dahlia Evans, Gail Vinnacombe, Linda Palter, Maurine Starkey, and Ray Droujkov

Editing Sue VanHattum, Carol Cross, and Chris Evans

Page Design & Layout Denise Gaskins

Howie Severson/Fortuitous

Publisher Delta Stream Media, an imprint of Natural Math, 309 Silvercliff, Cary, NC 27513

Library of Congress Control Number: 2014954318 ISBN: 978-0-9776939-3-1

Creative Commons Attribution--NonCommercial-ShareAlike license by Natural Math and Sue VanHattum.

Introduction

Do You Like Math?

Some of you are nodding. You love math like the authors in this book do, and you were excited to see a book that comes at the ideas of math from a new direction.

But many of you don't like math. You almost didn't pick this book up, and you're not so comfortable reading it. But you'd like to change that. Or there are kids in your life and you'd like to help nurture their love of math, or help them rediscover an enthusiasm for it.

Maybe you're in between, and you'd like to have more fun with math. Perhaps you know a math enthusiast and you're curious about it.

Welcome to the party everyone! Whatever your starting point, I think you'll enjoy this. Playing with Math is nothing like a math textbook. It's a book about how people who love math are sharing that love with others. It's written in the hope that you'll use your favorite ideas from this book and create your own ways to get together and play with math. There is some math tucked in between the stories, of course, but you can sneak right by it the first time through, if you really want to.

What do mathematicians do? We play with math. What are little kids doing, when they're thinking about numbers, shapes, and patterns? They're playing with math. You may not believe it yet, but you can have fun playing with math, too.

Can you remember back to when you were very young, before you started school? Most kids that young love to count and they love big numbers--it's all a game. Some of them retain that love, but most lose it by the time they hit middle school. If you were convinced by sufficiently unpleasant experiences in school to believe that math was simply horrid,* it might be hard later to remember that delight, because the memory would clash with your belief. Our brains use stories to organize

"If you're not comfortable with math, try starting with the homeschooling section. A few of those chapters were written by self-proclaimed math haters, and all of them are especially accessible."

* John Kellermeier, at Tacoma Community College, calls those unhappy experiences math abuse. See TacomaCC.edu/home/jkellermeier/Papers/RiskableClassroom/mathabuse.htm

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6 Introduction

what they keep, and a memory that clashes with the organizing stories won't have a place to fit in.

I loved math until college, but then I hit classes that were too hard and just didn't make enough sense to me. I got my degree, but lost my passion. For years, I thought I didn't like math that much. Luckily, I stumbled on some great teachers in my master's program and regained my love of math. My narrow escape allowed me to empathize with my students who hate and fear math. More than any other subject, math has to be approached by each student at their own pace, and in their own way, for it to make sense.

If you're not comfortable with math, try starting with the homeschooling section. A few of those chapters were written by self-proclaimed math haters, and all of them are especially accessible. If you're feeling more comfortable, you can read the chapters in any order you want. I put them in the order that made the most sense to me, but each reader will see the connections differently.

"Math is seeing patterns, solving

puzzles, using logic, finding ways to connect

disparate ideas, and so much more."

What Is Math?

Most people think math is adding, subtracting, multiplying, and dividing; knowing your times tables; knowing how to divide fractions; knowing how to follow the rules to find the answer. These bits are a tiny corner of the world of math. Math is seeing patterns, solving puzzles, using logic, finding ways to connect disparate ideas, and so much more. People who do math play with infinity, shapes, map coloring, tiling, and probability; they analyze how things change over time, or how one particular change will affect a whole system. Math is about concepts, connections, patterns. It can be a game, a language, an art form. Everything is connected, often in surprising and beautiful ways. The stories in this book are full of examples that show math from these angles.

And yet, the stories our culture tells about what math is may make you think "that's not math" when you see those examples. This sort of "cultural story" can be thought of as myth. A myth is a story that holds a lot of cultural weight, and that most people believe. Although myths may not be literally true, they often hold some deep truth--which is where they get their power. Math is hard, for instance. But it's hard like mountain climbing, with deep joy to be gained by the struggle.

The myths about math can lead you in some troublesome directions-- thinking you don't have a "math mind" perhaps (it's much more about practice and persistence), or that mathematicians solve math problems quickly (they don't), or that men are better at math than women (social

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