Blog #3-The Math Curse

The Math Curse

1. The Math Curse, written by Jon Scieszka is a math story that talks about a variety of math principles. The story begins with a girl(unnamed) waking up only to realize that each and every daily activity of her life can be applied to math. The story goes through an entire day of her life and discusses all the "problems" (haha math pun) that just never seem to let up. When she wakes up, she has to use math for time management in order to make it to school on time. While she's eating breakfast, she ponders how many quarts are in a gallon while she pours milk into her cereal, and a plethora of other conversions. Throughout the day, she deals with simple addition, subtraction, division, fractions, conversions, and probabilities. The teacher's name is even Ms. Fibonacci! My personal favorite math issue that this girl experiences has to do with scales. The Mississippi River is 4,000 km long, and an M&M is about one cm long. How many M&M's would it take to measure the Mississippi River? When the girl returns home from school, the math does not end here. Even dinner has math in it-here she ponders logic with True/False statements. She finally gets so fed up with math that she decides it time for bed, where of course she still can't stop thinking about it! 

2. I think the point of this book was express to young children just how important and prevalent math is in our daily lives. It may seem trivial to have to learn geometric proofs, linear equations, or find meaning in learning the quadratic formula at times. I think this book does a great job of showing that math can indeed be fun and easy and that it is an important skill to have. Although this book is aimed at children ages 6-9 it definitely contains some information that is appealing to adults, like the Quadratic formula and the Fibonacci sequence. It did not discuss one single math principle in depth, rather it touched on a lot of math ideas briefly. The one that I found most relevant to what we are learning in class right now is conversions and scaling. 

3. I personally think that literature, illustrated literature in particular is an effective way to engage children in math for multiple reasons. One being that I think it simplifies math by showing children that math is not just numbers and equations and uselessness, it can be applied to nearly everything! By adding a fun story, cool pictures, and a relatable subject, kids are definitely more intrigued and attentive. Times tables, story problems, or simply just writing on a white board sometimes isn't enough for children to understand or make any sort of connection with math. As a child, I loved reading picture books-no matter the subject. I know many kids love reading as well and could perhaps like math more if they read a picture book about it. Overall, math is a very important subject for everyone to learn and understand and that's why it is important to make it appealing to children through their interests-such as reading and looking at pictures!