Can You Leave Algebra Class Smiling?

Larry Lemon

Most of us have experienced some mathematics class that left us feeling cheated or bewildered. Mine came in the eighth grade. Every day we came to class and found a worksheet on our desks. They were really all the same boring practice. Across the top was a row of numbers, and down the side, a column of numbers. In the upper left-hand corner was an operation symbol like multiplication or division. After weeks of this it was hard to come to class with anything but a sour attitude. Fortunately, I was rescued from the Math Haters' Society by an exciting algebra course the very next year.

So how should we make math class fun and interesting?

Illustrate with Real Life

For example, replace the "loan at the bank" in a written problem with your own car loan and have the banker in a pinstriped suit sitting at a mahogany desk. Let numbers to be placed between given numbers be house numbers on Arithmetic Lane where Mrs. Little is in the first house and Farmer McGregor, in the last house.

Trying one day to get some geometry students to understand the concept of half-space, I told them how my brother and I would snack on ice cream. We always cut the container in half with a butcher knife. The two halves of the ice cream container were great examples of half-spaces--the open edge being the face that now shows the ice cream.

Tell Stories

You can also tell interesting sketches about people from the past. Everyone loves to hear how Karl Gauss, as an early elementary-school student, surprised his teacher by adding the numbers from 1 to 100 almost instantly. He added integers from each end (100 + 1; 99 + 2; 98 + 3) and got 101 every time, so he multiplied 101 by 50 and there it was--5050. My calculus students find that velocity vectors are more interesting if I tell them a kitty caused a wreck because his well-placed claws caused the driver of a vehicle to take his hands off the steering wheel while going around a corner.

Pretend and Surprise

Pretend you start with one sheet of paper and continue to double the stack over and over until your stack reaches past the moon. After 6 doubles you have a stack about 5/16" high, yet it takes only 42 times to reach beyond the moon. Pretend becomes surprise. My calculus students are shocked upon discovering that the imaginary can of paint for which we can calculate the volume as a finite number (such as 1.5 gallons) has a surface area that is infinite and cannot be painted.

Name and Illustrate Useful Principles

For years I could not get my students to understand some subtle things about finding how many numbers are in a list. For example, 1, 2, 3, . . .10 obviously has 10 numbers, but when you subtract 1 from 10 you get 9. There are 9 units between 1 and 10, so the subtraction is giving one less than the actual number of digits in the list. I began using a 100-foot-long fence with posts every 10 feet and had the students figure out how many posts were needed. They quickly concluded that we needed 11 posts, and thus the fence-post principle was illustrated and named. Sometimes a student will come up with a clever way to do something, so we name the process after him.

Use Humor

Many of the above suggestions lend themselves to unplanned but great humor. I can blunt the trauma of wrong answers on tests by calling them a "major boo boo" (MBB) or "extemporaneous baloney" (EB). When students cannot remember something, we call it "Teflon brain syndrome."

When the bell rings and you have been having fun with math, the students will say, "I can't believe how fast the period went!" You will have a smile on your face and a new joy in your teaching.

Reprinted from Teacher to Teacher, December 1998.

Used with permission from BJU Press. For permission to reproduce this article, please write BJU Press.