Weusemath.org is an excellent user-friendly site that
students can visit in order to gain a better appreciation of how math is used
every day in a whole variety of careers across all career types, not just
“math” jobs.
For instance, want to be a technical writer? Explore every detail of the job in the
careers section. Everything from salary
ranges, education, when math is used for that job, and even potential employers
are listed.
For teachers, there’s a fun section called “Math Tidbits”
that can be used as intros to lessons, such as this one:
There is also a section on new math discoveries which can be
great discussion topics. Combined, the
last two sections mentioned could gain student interest in a field that’s
mostly considered “boring”. The key to
getting students to continue in math is getting and keeping them interested in
math. Need even more help doing so? Visit the “Resources for math teachers” part
of the website.
I particularly like the section on how to succeed in
math. There is great advice there that
clearly indicates that anyone can succeed in math – an important lesson
everyone should learn.
As a whole, this site a huge step in the right direction as
a resource for teachers to help students like and maybe even love math. It’ll help open their minds to possibilities
and maybe even get some of them interested in a career they may never have
considered before. Definitely worth
bookmarking!
This is a great resource. I think a good activity based on this website would be to get students to see how many careers that interest them use math. They could look at all of the possible careers and choose their top three or five careers that they might be interested in. Then they would be required to figure out which of the units of math which they have learned about are directly related to that specific career! It would be a great way to make connections between learning and the real world.
ReplyDeleteThis is great - especially right now as there is a huge push in mathematics to help students develop a growth mind set. This is an approach to teaching math which believes that the mindset is more important that the initial ability in determining student progress. Students with a growth mindset believe in themselves, and believe that they can develop and build their talents, whereas a student with a fixed mindset might believe that they are simply not talented enough to acquire the ability, and as a result they stay in their comfort zone. I think these principles apply across all avenues of our own personal pursuits. If you tell yourself that you can't, then you probably won't. Thanks for sharing this site! We need to get students to understand that we can all make progress in math, and that we need to be open-minded to risks, challenges and acquiring new concepts.
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