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Middle School Brings Math Home

A common refrain heard by math teachers the world over is, “But, when will we need to use this?” Since virtual school began, Middle School faculty members Halyna Fried and Tina Karpovich have tasked their students with using math to answer real-world questions relevant to their lives both now and in the future.

Fried’s fifth grade class dove into virtual school, answering a critical question that has been top of mind since stay-at-home measures were put in place: “How much toilet paper do I really need?” For the first part of the three-part project, she asked her students to record how many full rolls of toilet paper they had in their house, collect data on their individual usage for a week, and then predict their entire family’s use for a week. In the second phase, students moved their data into spreadsheets and began a deeper analysis. They compared male-female usage, found the average use per gender per family, found ways the data could be skewed, and compared their estimates to the actual usage.

Fried’s point in conducting the project wasn’t actually to answer how much toilet paper was needed, but to teach her students that they could use rational problem solving to avoid the type of panic responses that lead to hoarding. That led to the final part of the project. Students could either create a 30-second PSA explaining the data surrounding toilet paper usage and encouraging people not to hoard or they could simply explain their findings and any revelations they had during the process.

Meanwhile, Karpovich’s class looked to the future, when we can once again sit down for a nice meal at a restaurant. As the sixth graders were studying percentages, Karpovich saw everything from the creation of the meal to the paying the bill as a way to ground the concept in real-life experiences. She began by having her students choose a recipe and then break down the fraction, decimal, and percent of each ingredient in the meal. They drew a pie graph to illustrate their calculations and then learned how to use Google sheets to illustrate the data to see if their own drawing and calculations were correct. From there, her class created a menu, participated in the virtual making of the meal, factored the costs, and calculated the bill including 6% tax and 15% tip. For the final piece of the project, they learned how to create a purchase order, write checks, and balance a checkbook--all lessons that will serve them well in the future.

While the hands-on lessons may not have been how Fried and Karpovich had originally planned to teach these concepts, the timely and relevant topics certainly made an impression on their students and answered the age-old question, “But, when will we need to use this?”