I’m working on these inquiries over the weekend because the week has been very busy, with Monday’s Bank Holiday, running whole staff INSET on Tuesday (as well as EPQ supervisor training), an assembly promoting our new HPQ course to Y9 (as they make choices for Y10) on Thursday, finishing preparation for a Y7 English inquiry and meeting the Y1 teacher to discuss and develop her fantastic interdisciplinary inquiry on “Who would enjoy a holiday on Guernsey?” – alongside more day-to-day Library things like starting to prepare for the Y6-7 transition days and hosting some internal exams in the Library…
The maths teacher has been working on developing the ‘numerals and counting systems circus’ for Y8 while he has been off-island this week and I’m excited to see what he produces. The books he lent me are:
- Crump, Thomas (1990). The anthropology of numbers. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
- Closs, Michael P. (ed.) (1997). Native American Mathematics. Austin: Texas University Press.
- Menninger, K. (1969). Number words and number symbols: A cultural history of numbers. Mineola, NY: Dover.
- Gerdes, Paulus (1999). Geometry from Africa: Mathematical and educational explorations. Washington, DC. The Mathematical Association of America.
- Crossely, J. N. (1987). The emergence of number. Singapore: Word Scientific.
- Powell, Arthur P. & Frankenstein, Marilyn (eds) (1997). Ethnomathematics: Challenging eurocentrism in mathematics education. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press.
Definite overkill for a Y8 inquiry (although they take me back to my own university days – my first degree was in maths) but a very interesting foundation, and they serve as a reminder that this is actually a very important area of study in maths and maths education which doesn’t often appear directly on school curricula. This isn’t just a dinky opportunity to play around after exams – it could really open up the whole area of ethnomathematics for some of these students, and rekindle an interest in maths as they begin to understand the social and cultural importance of the subject.
I also had additional inspiration for the Y7 Fibonacci inquiry because, as a direct result of our INSET presentation, we were contacted on Friday by one of our Biology teachers about developing an ecology based inquiry for all of Y7 for this time next year using the school nature trail. Seredipitously this could link directly to the Y7 Fibonacci inquiry, creating another interdisciplinary opportunity.
Now I just need to get on with planning the details…
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