You may have seen some text books with covers that look like this:
I heard math legend Dan Meyer say that these covers do nothing to engage students in maths, in fact all they do is make kids want to hate that guy on the cover. Why isn't he at school or at home doing his maths homework?
However, we should all be glad to have these covers. It could be worse - check out this:
In the search for engagement, publishers have tried their best to make their products look attractive - bright covers, colour pictures and diagrams, interesting articles.
But to be looking for the real world inside the covers of a textbook? I think not.
So where do you find "Real World Maths"?
Err...in the real world?
Here's the door -
get on the other side of it!
My experience teaching in the inner city is that what distinguishes poor students from affluent students is that the affluent students have used any number of tools to enhance their ability to slam the math "facts" into the problem automatically, versus the poor kids who rely far too frequently on calculators, wall charts or (gasp) counting strategies. The reason why it makes a difference is that when you clear the math fact recall out of the prefrontal cortex and kick it into a non-judgment part of the brain like the parietal sulcus, the child can think about the problem and about the higher order math. I posted some research on this at my math blog, http://www.mathnook.com/blog/.
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