The students were riveted as a classmate led a discussion on the series of church-burnings that had recently occurred in the South. He documented the historic trends of racism in America, the emotional impact of the destruction of churches, and the delay in the media's reporting of the story. He noted the unpredictability of the onslaught and the fact that neither a clean linear, nor quadratic, nor exponential model could reflect the past nor serve as a good predictor of the future.
In another section, a student shared her understanding of the annihilation of the Amazon rain forest. As charts were circulating around the classroom, she explained the local economic reality versus the global, moral obligation. She stunned the group when she noted that if our campus were torn apart at the current rate of forest destruction, the property would be barren in fewer than 90 seconds. Her subsequent explanation of the mathematical models continued to shed light on the seemingly hopeless situation and the distressing nature of its course.
The Gap Between Real-World Issues and Mathematics
Yes, these were math classrooms -- the kinds of classrooms that encourage educators to answer the following questions: Should teachers in any subject area be willing to step outside the text for awhile to make a serious connection between the content studied and a topic of student interest, and should teachers support students as they single-handedly demonstrate their levels of subject mastery and guide peers in a discussion they will not soon forget? After listening to the presentations mentioned above and numerous similar discussions, the answer for me is a resounding "yes." The participants learned more about themselves, one another, life and the application of mathematics than they had in the first several months combined.
Toward that end, mathematics teachers must have the freedom and flexibility to allow time for more socially oriented education and discussions. The chance for students to research, think about and weigh the significance of the topics must not be compromised. It is the combination of each student's grasp of the mathematics and her or his personal investment that makes the project compelling.
This was certainly true in the case of the student who presented the material on the church burnings. He pushed us to imagine the potentially profound devastation that the burning of churches wreaks -- loss of haven, home and family. As he led us through the data, point-to-point, church-to-church, classmates wrestled with what the points on his graph truly represented and asked why it was that 33 churches had been burned before it became a national issue. In the end, his conclusion -- that the inconstant pattern of the data seemed, in a social sense, to be a perfect reflection of the unpredictable nature of the acts -- resonated with his classmates because there had been some time for them to try to understand.
Martha T. Cummings, a teacher and administrator in independent schools for nearly 20 years, is a published novelist and freelance writer based in coastal Rhode Island.
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