More than 150 teachers from the San Francisco Bay area are working side-by-side with engineers from companies like Dow Chemical, Intel, and Lockheed Martin for eight weeks this summer in order to equip themselves with lesson plans that drive home the idea that math is relevant to everyday life, the Contra Costa Times reports.
The hands-on experience provided by engineers, as well as professors from Stanford and the University of California, Berkeley, can be brought back to their middle school classrooms and help them make stronger connections for students between math concepts and students’ real lives, it is hoped. Their workshop is one part of the Industry Initiatives for Science and Math Education (IISME) program, which also offers teachers around the world free downloads of hundreds of lesson plans. Most of those lessons weave math through the fibers of interdisciplinary projects, like science labs, agriculture, and manufacturing.
“A lot of times, students will say, ‘What good is this?'” the paper quoted one teacher as saying. Next year, when students ask what good it will do to study math, he said he plans to show them how Dow develops products for farmers who grow the food they eat in the cafeteria and at home. Then he’s going to have his students role-play, doing what process control operators do on the job, i.e., monitor the temperature, pressure, and flow rates of liquids through pipes and tanks.
In order to do this, the students will have to read charts and think on their feet to correct systems with a temperature or pressure that falls outside the normal operating limits.
Other teachers plan to teach in hybrid classrooms. Sure, they’re teaching math, but their classrooms may feature science experiments prominently.
“I’ve been seeing students not prepared in geometry and precalculus,” the Times quoted one teacher as saying. “My plan is to teach Algebra I completely differently. If you walk into my classroom, you’re going to be confused about if it is a chemistry lab or a physics lab or a math class. I’m going to use experimental algebra.”
