For students, math may become boring and stagnant so, how do we, as teachers, make math more fun? How about having students make a cartoon about their favorite math problem? Inspiring students to be creative and artistic in math class is not a common practice, but with this exercise you can combine art, language arts, and math all into one.
The idea in creating a cartoon for math is to help the student understand the different concepts better. Any time you do a project, there is a better comprehension of the material because the student has researched all the finite details about it. When you combine that with your math concepts, students will walk away learning more about what the teacher intended.
Creating a cartoon is a relatively simple task. Toon Doo and Go Animate are two websites in which you can create and publish your work on the internet for free. They are simple and easy to use while still allowing creative minds to prosper.
As silly as it sounds, math can be funny, literally and figuratively. This week's video assignments caused a chuckle on my part with an easy way to multiply large numbers. I was hooked, I'm always looking for a way to make short cuts or make life easier. Like the old saying goes, "work smarter, not harder." The first video here shows two rather large numbers that will be multiplied together in "an easy way." Take a look.
At first, I thought it was going to show me the lattice method of multiplication when they started drawing the boxes, but I soon realized there wasn't enough boxes for all the place values correlated to the numbers shown. When it started to look like a calculator I thought, O.K. Where are they going with this? Well, the fast and easy way to multiply two large numbers together is, use a calculator. Awe, you got me! I'll be sure to use a calculator on big numbers.
This was an example of how math can be funny literally, but how can it be funny figuratively? As we all have experienced the ups and downs of math, we know our mind can play funny tricks on us or we make mistakes with simple addition. The Abbott and Castello video proved how easy it is for us to interpret math in different ways. Each way should have the same outcome or answer, but sometimes we have to look at the process of how we arrived at the answer to really understand what we are doing wrong or correct. With 28 donuts and seven officers to feed, like in this video, the simple answer for all of us is, four donuts per officer. Not for the baker though, in his mind, there were 13 donuts for seven officers. When he went to prove it, he showed us three different ways in which he came up with the answer. The crazy thing was, they all made sense if you looked at how he arrived at the answer and didn't understand the basics of math.
That brings me to my main point, each student has their own perceived knowledge on math concepts. They may be right or need some work with it, but this is what makes math funny figuratively. The craziness of our minds and how we think rationally to arrive at answers are sometimes goofy. When we understand the math concepts though, now our rational thinking is the correct way of thinking and we arrive at the correct answer. In the end, teachers need to remember to make math simple for students to understand and it's O.K. to laugh at ourselves, litterally
