Is anyone integrating storytelling or applied narrative as a technique/methodology to help teach undergraduate mathematics-based course work? If so, how are you using it and from which sources are you drawing your teaching tools/materials?
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- Hello kids ! - Hello, teacher ! - Hey, kids: Let me tell you story ! Once upon a time, a math teacher failed ALL the students who kept making the same mistakes over... and over... and over again... THE END. Now... who wants to come to the blackboard, or show me his homework ?...
– Lucian Jan 07 '14 at 23:21
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First you have to find out what interests your students have, then you can adapt your exercises to these interests. for instants boys often like cars. so instead of calculating the volumne of a boring cylinder, calculate the cylinder capacity of a lamborghini murciélago! if some of your kids are interested you can say that this car has a specific power output of x ps per liter and they should calculate how many ps this car actually has.
Show them that math is a tool to find out interesting things.
Also work with curiosity. Like: What do you think how much money does bill gates earn in one second? Let them guess, then say: according to the forbes list, last year he had x1, this year he has x2, now the difference is what he earned this year. This will be an amount they cant imagine, (i guess most of us here cant imagine how much that really is :) ). Now let them calculate what he earns in a second, this will be still much and you can say: we are working on this for 5 minutes, lets have a look what bill earned in this time.
im quite sure some of the kids will say "wow thats a lot" :-)
Stefan
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