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What is your most memorable math lesson? For me, it was when Mrs. Kaylor helped us visualize and understand place value by building straw men as we counted straws by units of one, ten, and a hundred.
I struggle to come up with many more memories and there's a good chance I'm not alone. If I asked the same question for other subjects, like social studies or language arts, however, I bet your answers would come a lot more easily.
The difference? These subjects include lessons that are often applicable to real life. Whether it's a mock trial, a school play, or a science experiment, project work deepens student learning by allowing them to explore the connections between content and real life.
Math lessons, on the other hand, have historically focused less on real-life connections. Like many students, I excelled in math by memorizing rules and tricks. In college, I trained to teach social studies, but became a math teacher by accident because I had earned enough math credits to qualify for a math teaching certification. It wasn't until I returned to earn a master's in math education that I discovered that math can be so much more than memorization.
