Maths and Mao

MORE MATHS: I continue to power my way through "How to Learn Math" via Stanford online. I want to be done through Week 7 before we leave, as the course ends Sept. 27, which will give me a few days to finish up when we get back. I think I might just make it!

Today part of my homework involved solving a trio of algebra problems. They were ...
1) Daniel went to visit his grandma, who gave him $1.50. Then he bought a book for $3.20. If he had $2.30, how much money did he have before visiting his grandmother?
2) Can you make every number between 1 and 20 using only 4, 4, 4, 4 and any operation? Eg (4 / 4 + 4) x 4?
3) You have a total of 14 rocks. Pile B has two more than Pile A; Pile C has four times as many as Pile A. Then I was supposed to write three algebraic equations illustrating that.  For instance, my first one was x +  (x+2) + 4x = 14.

Naturally, I made the kids do the homework, too. I tried to adopt all the techniques I've learned from Professor Jo Boaler.  The first thing I did was tell them I had some FUN! math challenges for them. I sold it so well, they were looking forward to doing it. :)

We read the first story together - about Daniel and his money and his grandma. I stressed to the kids that there was absolutely more than one way to go about solving it, that they should draw lots of pictures. I told them not to worry about the RIGHT answer, just to play around, plugging numbers here and there and see what they came up with after a couple of minutes.

We reconvened about 3 minutes later and they had both figured out the right answer in completely different ways. We talked about each route, and my route to solving it, which was a bit different than either of theirs.  It was fun, so mission accomplished.

For the second problem, I told them to just play around with the fours, using addition, subtraction, division, multiplication and every combination thereof, and see how many different numbers between 1 and 20 they could come up with. I gave them a couple of minutes and then we got together and compared the equations we'd each come up with that were the same. The more fun part was sharing the equations that were different.

Lastly, I asked them to solve the rocks and piles problem, giving them pennies to use as rocks to make it easier. But the best part of that problem was not just plugging in the right numbers, but being able to write different algebraic equations that would let someone find the right answer.

End result: Math is FUN!

SEEING RED: CJ is into geopolitics in a big way. Or rather, a BIG WAY. We spend a SIGNIFICANT part of each day talking and learning about world politics. Today, he was asking about Mao (pronounced Mayo by him), and I told him that we have a book of Mao's teachings thanks to our friend Joe. Joe worked/taught in China and brought us a "Little Red Book" back home.  When I told CJ we had one, his eyes lit up like it was Christmas morning. ;)

He pored over the first two chapters before deciding it would be a great book to take on the plane to kill time. Let's just hope the TSA people don't think there's anything wonky about us traveling with Mao's teachings. ...

IN THE BEGINNING: We are very close to finishing up our first week's worth of lectures for "From the Big Bang to Dark Energy via Coursera. We're lovin' it!!

Today we learned why distant galaxies looked red and about the noise the universe makes (yes, the universe has a soundtrack!), as well as why the universe has cooled as it expands. From a formulaic standpoint, lambda gets bigger as the energy get smaller, therefore it's cooler. I think anytime I get to use 'lambda' in a sentence, it's cooler! :)