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The Collector

 While this may ring up visions of Guardians of the Galaxy and/or Marvel Comics, this actually relates to teachers as they have been meticulously creative collecting whatever content they can muster to make sound lessons for their students. 

One of the things I have thought back to, was when Numb3rs was popular on CBS.  So I did a little digging.  I found a few links like http://mathstrategies.wordpress.com/numb3rs-activities and http://pi.math.cortnell.edu/~numb3rs/lipa/Episodes.  It helped me reminisce why students are attracted to these dramas more than they are ACTUAL MATH CLASS!  

With the group that I have this year who appears to have NO academic interest in math, let me make a similar suggestion from a mistake I already went through; Don't show them Flatland: A tale of many dimensions. I should have done a a Lexile score before presenting it.  It failed the first week. Miserably.  The old English used, (keep in mind this was 1884 during the Victorian Era), was just too "thick" to wade through to get to the other issues of social justice, sexism, cast systems, and of course "the rebellion."

It doesn't hurt while perusing materials, to earmark (or bookmark) them for possible use later, but do your due diligence and RESEARCH for how and what the material covers as well as these following criteria:

1. will it be of interest to the student

2. Will it help with the (many) standards you are to cover

3. How much legwork will it take to implement

4. Is there a way for exploration and/or closure to the topic you want to open (some materials are notoriously bad at not providing resources or answers).

Getting back to Numb3rs, I hope to fire up the students again and raise discussions about how math is used (or could be used) outside of the classroom.  That's my goal even more than accomplishing a standard for Minnesota.

Til I chalk again,

Mr. Shel



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