Tuesday, October 30, 2007
Storytelling & Math
It never struck me that storytelling would play a role in mathematics. Word problems are important, but they don't involve storytelling. I think any story regarding the history of an important figure or concept in math would interest students because it gives them background on what was going on when the discovery happened or what the atmosphere was like when the discoverer was alive. How is this part of storytelling though? It's more factual and biographical than what one would picture a story to be. So how would one incorporate storytelling into my subject area? It might be fun to have the students create their own stories involving whatever material we're learning. If my class were learning about measurement, I could ask them to come up with their own short stories using what they've learned or perhaps ask them to come up with a story about some mathematicians who need to solve a problem. How would *you* say storytelling relates to math?
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2 comments:
I actually think that storytelling does go along with math and can make math more fun for the students.
If you are attempting to explain something like velocity to the students you can make up a story of a rising ball and incorporate math with what the ball is doing and going through. Thus making the ball the main character of your saga and the math helps propel the story line.
It might be cliche to use a movie but in the movie "A Mirror has Two Faces" a math professor finds a way to incorporate story telling into his classes and it makes for a more interesting class and more engaging for the students.
In algebra you can make up a story about X. When you have X + Y = you can say X is female, Y is male and together they go out on a date. When you subtract X from Y and have them alone they could have broken up. One the students will try to find a way to get X and Y back together and when graphing the lines on a grid they will see how the X and Y interact with one another.
I think if you place story telling in math on the student's level they will be more interested and involved with learning math. You might reach more students with story telling that you might not reach any other way.
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