Math+Story+Day+2010

=Math Storytelling Day 2010=

toc September 25th is the Math Story Day. On this day, young and old gather around campfires or digital projectors and engage in mathematical storytelling. The traditional food for this holiday is evocative of story structures. For example, serve fractal cookies or broccoli, and recursive pizzas.

Add your stories and pictures to this wiki, or email them to maria@naturalmath.com


 * [[image:Fractal_cookies.jpg width="319" height="237"]] || [[image:Recursive_pizza_Madison_Carol_1.jpg width="320" height="240"]] ||
 * Fractal cookies by [|EvilMadScientist.com] || Recursive pizza is ready for the oven! Cooked in 2010 Carol and Madison Cross ||

Here is the map of people and groups who celebrated the Math Story Day in 2010. Click the map to add yourself - it's editable by everyone!

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Original Stories This Year
Sue VanHattum wrote in to say:

My son is in the most amazing mini-school. Right now it only has 5 kids, all about 8 years old. (They'd like to increase to about 8 kids.) Felicia runs this school out of her home. Already my son has learned to swim during school, and decided he loves science class. I love that they do sun salutations, and have a rock basket for noticing positive things that happen.

Felicia has been studying lots of different educational philosophies to help her decide what she'll do with the kids. She liked Waldorf's emphasis on story, and made up this math story...

Jolly Josh
by Felicia Jeffley, Richmond, CA, USA

Once upon a time there was a boy named Josh. Josh was a jolly boy. He loved to laugh and play and sing and jump. He looked like any other boy, especially when he was riding his bike or swimming or drawing or reading.

But when he walked, that’s when things got a little strange. He counted. He counted by 2’s and 5’ and 10’s and 100’s. He never just walked. He always counted and walked.

When he walked to the park he counted by 2’s. When he walked to the beach, he counted by 5’s. When he walked to the swimming pool he counted by 10’s. When he walked to school, he counted by 100’s.

“Josh, stop counting,” his sister would insist. “Josh, I’m talking to you", his father would scold. “Josh, are you listening?” his mother would ask. “Josh, school’s over,” his friend would remind him.

But Josh kept counting and counting and counting and counting until ... he reached 1000.

Well, when he went to school, it was simple. It’s easy to get to 1000 by counting by a 100. It’s not too bad to get there counting by 10’s. And if he fast walked, which he often did, counting by 5’s wasn’t so bad. But counting by 2’s all the way to the park was long, long, long, long. It seemed to take forever.

None of his friends would ever walk with Josh to the park. “I’ll meet you there,” they’d say. His mother would talk on her phone the whole walk. His dad would listen to the game on the radio. His sister, well, she refused to take her little brother to the park.

One day when Josh was walking to the park with his mom, he was so busy counting he tripped over a brick. Down he fell. It hurt, but instead of crying all he kept saying was, “62, 62, 62, 62,” in a whimpery little voice.

“Josh, are you okay,” his mother said closing her cell phone and running to him.

"62, 62, 62, 62,” he replied.

She could see that he wasn’t okay. She pulled out her phone again and called 911. While they waited, she counted softly and sweetly to him.

“2, 4, 6, 8, ….62”

That seemed to calm him down. She sang it again all the way to 62. After a 3rd time, the ambulance arrived. A nice EMT (Emergency Medical Technician) walked over to him.

“So what where you doing when you fell down?”

“Counting.”

“Counting. I used to do that too. I’d count to big numbers, really big.”

Josh’s eyes opened wide, “Really?”

“Yea, it was fun. It’s a good thing too. Now I have to use all that counting in my job. I have to find the right house and know if the house numbers are going up or down. Sometimes the house numbers skip, like by 2’s. Do you know how to count by 2’s?”

“Yes, 2, 4, 6, 8…” Josh said in a whisper.

“Yes, he can count all the way to 1000,” interrupted his mother.

“Wow, that’s impressive!” said the EMT.

“62,” said Josh.

“62?” repeated the EMT.

“Stopped at 62…”

“Are you trying to say that you had gotten to the number 62 today?”

“Yes. Don’t want to forget.” Josh added.

“Oh, that’s why you keep saying it. You don’t want to forget where you were!”

Josh nodded his head a bit.

“How about I write it down for you. Then, you can start off with 62 the next time you walk to the park?”

Josh smiled softly.

“Well, it looks like a sprain. So, Josh I don’t think you’ll be able to resume counting for a few days. We need to get some ice on that ankle."

“Well, that’s good news,” his Mom said in relief. “Could have been worse.”

“That’s true,” said the EMT. How about if I give you all a ride to your house. Let’s see. We’re in front of house number 2 and you live at 50. I’m noticing that the houses go up on this side by 2’s. Yes, that one is 4, the next 6, the next 8 and so on. So, your house is not too far from here.”

The EMT picked Josh up and put him in the ambulance. His mother hopped in and off they went.

“62, 60, 58, 56, 54, 52…” the EMT counted.

Josh’s eyes got big.

“So, Mr. Number Counter, can you do that?” asked the EMT.

Josh shook his head, no.

“It’s counting backwards by 2’s!”

The EMT counted backwards all the way to 0. Josh was impressed.

Josh was better in a few days and off he went to the park. “62, 64, 68, 70…” he began. On the way home he decided to walk backwards and count backwards. We’ll, that didn’t last too long. He ran into a tree. This time it was not an emergency, just funny. He laughed. His mother laughed.

“I think I should turn around,” he said. His mother agreed.

“But you can still count backwards,” she reassured him.

And that’s what he did. All the way home from 1000 to 0. Well, with a little help from his mother.

Jolly Josh arrived home jumping for joy. “I know how to count backwards!” he exclaimed.

From that point on, ... When he went to the park he counted by two’s on the way there and backwards by 2’s on the way back. When he walked to the beach, he counted by 5’s on the way there and backwards by 5’s on the way back. When he walked to the swimming pool he counted by 10’s on the way there and backwards by 10’s on the way back. When he walked to school, he counted by 100’s on the way there and backwards by 100’s on the way back.

Eventually, people stopped asking him to stop counting. Instead they asked him questions like, ... “Josh, can you count the number of braids in my hair? They have to be even.” his sister would demand. “Josh, how many yards are on a football field?” his father quizzed. “Josh, can you get enough birthday cookies out, so each kid can have 2?” his mother requested. “Josh, how much is 5+5+5+5 because I got four $5 bills for my birthday?” his friend asked.

“30, 100, 16, 20,” he answered without hesitation. No matter the questions, Josh was quick with the answer. And the more they asked, the quicker he got. And the quicker he got, the more they asked.

He also listened to music and played soccer and counted stars at night and he still walked and counted. He counted forwards and backwards and backwards and forwards. Josh truly was a Jolly boy!

The end.

GeoGebra Shenanigans
by Maria Droujkova, Cary, NC, USA

Madison and I were working on GeoGebra. One of the fundamental notions of geometric construction is the idea of freedom. You can place free objects however you want. Dependent objects that are situated just so; you can't randomly move them around. For example, if you draw a circle, you can make it any size, and choose any place for its center and any size. If you place a point on the circle, it can run around, but can't leave the circumference. Now, if you make a circle with the same radius as before, centered at this point on the circumference, you will get a double-circle drawing. The intersections of two circles are points with no freedom whatsoever. They are completely defined by the construction.

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Now, in GeoGebra, points that have some freedom are blue by default and you can drag them around to make amusing animations. Points with no freedom are black and you can't drag them. Madison was productively struggling with his constructions having too much freedom. Figuring out how to restrict freedom through construction is where math is at! You can sketch a decent square by placing four points in a shape that looks somewhat regular. However, because your construction has too much freedom, you can drag points around and the shape won't be square anymore. After a bit of work, Madison proudly said he solved the problem of too much freedom. Indeed, the points he was trying to restrict were black, as dependent points should be, and the construction was beautifully sparse, which is a math value. Too sparse, in fact...

...Because Madison changed point color attribute in the Properties menu.

He started laughing before I figured out his amazing construction secret.

A Little Story About Symbols
by Bradford Hansen-Smith

There was a mathematical meeting of symbols.

The x said nothing. The y said, “why?” Then the a said, “aaaaaahhh…” The b said, “because!”

Then all the numbers came filing in one after the other. When the numbers got too big to get through the door, the c said, “see.”

Julie's Dream
by Dani Novak, Ithaca, NY

This is a true story: The dream really happened and it shows how fearful math can be for young kids and how Julie transformed her fear to Love by bringing the fear to the surface through the dream

Julie's Dream:

Julie was my student in the class "What Is Math." She was so afraid of Math that she never even looked at the board whenever anything mathematical was mentioned. One early morning Julie came to my office and handed me a paper and said, "Dani, I just woke up from a most vivid dream and wrote it down a few minutes ago, please read it."

I took the paper and while Julie was still in my office a read the following story that will forever stay with me. This is what Julie wrote: "I was sitting in a classroom with about 50 other students. Among them was my small high school class and also my current "What Is Math" class. The teacher locked the door and give each one of us a fifty page Math test and said that only those students who pass the test will be allowed to leave the room. I knew that my best friend Katherine will pass since she knew Math well and indeed after just a few minutes she completed the test and gave it to the teacher who flipped through the pages and said "You did not pass." He then tied Katherine to her chair, poured some gasoline from a can around her and then struck a match and Katherine was burned alive in front of my eyes which were wide open. I could not close them.

I decided to approach the teacher and ask for an extension and to my surprise he agreed and unlocked the door for me. I went for a walk and there I met you Dani and asked you for help but you refused. That instant I woke up with two questions and their answers:

1. Why didn't Dani help me?

2. What is Math?

Answer below... just scroll down...

1. Because I can do it myself 2. Math is Love (Julie wrote it in her paper)

Recursive Pizza
by Carol Cross and Madison Cross Sugg, Cary, NC, USA

We went with a white/red/white/red circle theme: white dough, red tomato sauce, white cheese, red pepperoni, white onion rings, red pepperoni shown through holes in rings.

But then we added more cheese and red pepper flakes, which reduces the effects but we actually planned to eat it for dinner... And once it was cooked, you really couldn't see it at all. But we tried!



Tweeting Math
by Colin Graham, Chester, England

Every year, on her birthday, Maria Droujkova celebrates her birthday by holding @Math Storytelling Day. She usually sends a tweet to invite contributions. I know it’s her birthday, so I retweeted the link with a message of my own. In her own inimitable way, Maria sent me a response and a challenge! Now, 140 characters is very difficult to tell a story in, because it can be too long to retweet and share with others, as Peter Rowlett tried to do. Sometimes, people actually link to the wrong thing and so the connection gets lost or broken. Instead of pointing Noel-Ann to my tweet, Peter sent her to his blog post, which was the original inspiration for me to tweet him. So, because the tweet I sent to Peter never made it to #pihunt, I sent a new, slightly longer one to improve on the original. And they all lived happily ever after…

On the Fence
by Irene Pham, California, USA

I bought a 3.5 acre piece of property from a friend, who told me that a part of the fenced area actually had been subdivided and was owned by someone else. She pointed out where the property line of that lot was. There was a for-sale sign in it. She suggested I buy that piece back from whoever owned it.

A year later, someone came up to the house and said we had to take out our tomato garden, because he had purchased the lot and was going to fence it in. Our tomato garden was right in the middle of his lot.

I said he was surely mistaken, because all this area was my 3.5 acres. He had a surveyor show me my error. A mobile home now stands where my vegetable garden once grew.

My lot was originally 4 acres, and the original owner sold off 1/8 of it--a half acre. If I had learned any conceptual geometry, I could have looked at my plot map, and seen that 1/8 of 4 acres could not possibly be represented by the line my friend waved at with her hand that day. She was indicating about 1/16 of the field. If I had learned anything about the economics of decision making (something about not just considering the field, but actually buying it), I could have moved faster, and retrieved my 1/2 acre before it became someone else's house, with all my tomatoes plowed under. Tough math lesson!

I hope everyone else's math stories are happy ones, about more chocolate chips in the brownies & stuff like that.

Math and Words
by Susan Mygatt, Cary, NC, USA

Well, Ben was doing Algebra yesterday and was very excited about a nonsense poem that Lewis Carroll wrote called, "The Hunting of the Snark". It corresponded exactly to the point of a lesson in Harold Jacob's Algebra book exploring Inverse Operations/ Equations in One Variable (Chapter 5, lesson 2). Ben thought it was an extremely clever and fun way to reinforce the lesson. He loves the Jacob's book, as did my other 2 kids (though not quite as much as Ben!) My observation has been that kids who are especially "verbal" (I sometimes wince at that characterization, as if there are kids who AREN"T verbal? You know what I mean?) really enjoy reading and writing their math - seeing it in words. Interestingly, part of the IB program in the schools is to have the students write an paper explaining their thought process in solving a particular problem. Will found the project to be very difficult, though I do think it helped clarify his thinking.

Let Them Count!
shared by Alexander Bogomolny this year; story written by David Bogomolny and illustrated this year by Eli Bogomolny this year, New York, NY, USA

In a small, bright forest, a small group of little animals became very close friends. They would sit in class together, eat their lunches together, and play together after school. As they grew up and learned from each other, the animals taught themselves math tricks to make their games more interesting. [|The rest of the story...]

Trackbacks and links

 * [|Math Mama Writes blog]
 * [|Sine of the Times: Dividing the Universe by Zero blog]
 * [|Natural Math email group discussion]
 * [|A statistical fallacy story shared by Rakesh Biswas]
 * [|Let's Play Math blog]
 * [|"Let them count," a story by David Bogomolny, shared by his dad Alexander from Cut-the-Knot]
 * [|Elaine Cucci Adams shares "Spooky the square pumpkin" with her special ed class]