Back to school: Time to engage parents and students

By NCTM President Diane J. Briars
August 2014

It’s August—back-to-school time. As you plan for the new school year, don’t forget to make explicit plans for engaging parents and families. As you well know, parents can be invaluable supports for their children’s mathematics learning. While it’s helpful to send parents basic information about their children’s mathematics class, such as course outlines, assignments, and descriptions of teacher expectations, they typically need much more than that to be prepared to support their children’s mathematics learning, as the following examples illustrate:

• The father of a third-grader who says, “Every night, my son and I fight about math! Like last night. I told him you have to start adding from the right; he says ‘No, you don’t. That’s not the way we do it. I can start adding at the left—or anywhere.’ He gets the right answers—and explains to me what he’s doing. But it’s not the way I learned it! Is that okay? I’m very frustrated!”
• The mother of a seventh grader who calls the principal, complaining that her daughter’s mathematics teacher is not teaching; she’s just asking students questions instead of showing students “the steps.”
• The mother of a high school student who complains, “Ms. Smith is not a good teacher. When my son does his homework, there are problems that he struggles to solve. If she were a good teacher, he would be able to work all the problems easily.”

Sound familiar? Read more of Diane's current President's Corner message.

October's Problem to Ponder

Each month the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics (NCTM) challenges us with a Problem to Ponder. This month, we get to explore how the strength of our desire to eat chocolate predicts our age.

A Howling Good Halloween Puzzle

Many of you may have already seen a version of October’s Problem to Ponder, a number puzzle that determines your age on the basis of the number of times that you want to eat chocolate per week. The October Problem to Ponder includes an additional challenge: Why does the puzzle work?

• How many times a week do you want to eat chocolate? (Pick more than one but less than 10 times).
• Multiply that number by 2.
• Add 5.
• Multiply that result by 50.
• If your birthday has occurred this year, add 1760 to that result. If your birthday is still to come this year, add 1759.
• Subtract the year (all four digits) in which you were born.
• The result will be a three-digit number. The first digit will be the number of times a week that you want to eat chocolate, and the last two digits will be your age.

Extension: Suppose you wanted chocolate 10 or more times a week, or no chocolate at all. Could you still make the puzzle work?

Note to teachers: You can base the puzzle on anything that your students might want to do a number of times a week—for example, play video games, talk with or text friends, or read a book.