Math Field Day is coming up for Monongalia County Schools. First, though, a run of the narrative numbers.
For most of us civilians, the first wave of the pandemic put a defining sum on everything. That was when the schools were shuttered and our kids were sequestered at home.
That was when we shuddered at the prospect of having to help them with their homework. Well, that one subject, anyway. You know: The M-word.
Math.
You wanted to help – you really did.
“But I’m not a math person,” your core cried.
To which, Monica McCartney laughs.
“Yeah, I hear that all the time,” the math coach for the local district said Wednesday.
“Not true. Everyone’s a math person. Or they can be.”
For her, math is about the interconnectedness of it all. Get your mind right, she said, and you’ll see how math just fits, logically.
If you want to see the world the way a math teacher does, get behind the wheel of your car, she said: With an old-school road atlas in the passenger seat to go with the GPS.
“The GPS is going to tell you, turn-by-turn, where to get where you’re going,” she said, “but at the end, you’re going to have no idea how you got there.”
And, she said, “You’re still not going to know where you are.”
In contrast, she said, regarding an oh-so-20th century road map, with its squiggles and blue lines, will set your brain’s synapses to multiplying.
“You’re going to make connections,” she said. “It’s all part of a picture.”
As opposed to simply reciting by rote the multiplication tables your mom and dad memorized in school.
Besides, she said, with a laugh, you never get away from math, anyway. It’s there when you have to double-up on the recipe or figure out the sales tax.
It’s especially helpful with interest rates on your credit card and helps you to understand exactly what the contractor is talking about concerning that resurfacing job in your driveway.
“That’s why we make it real-world,” she said, when it comes to teaching in the Mon district.
It will all be there for the figuring Monday through Wednesday next week at the district’s Suncrest Center facility. That’s when Math Field Day 2022 commences for students in grades 4-12.
No algorithm will be left unturned, and the keys to those science-fiction-looking calculators will be clicking like a Bach concerto.
Students who tabulate it all correctly will have a chance to move on to regional and state competition.
It’s challenging, McCartney said, but it’s also something else: Fun.
Yes, really, she said, chuckling.
She began her career in education as a math teacher in Mon. What did she tell the student who, echoing his harried mom or dad, perhaps, told her he wasn’t a math person, either?
“Everyone’s a math person. You just aren’t one yet, but we’re going to fix that.”
TWEET @DominionPostWV
