Tag: real numbers

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Opportunities for Parents to Engage Students with Math

Math is often considered an esoteric set of information that is disjointed from the reality people face, aside perhaps from money. Sadly, in school, especially in older grade levels, math is indeed presented this way.

sally math problem

A situation as simple as riding an elevator provides opportunities to show and engage a student with math applied in authentic and common situations. For example, the elevator buttons address counting and cardinality (4 indicates a total of 4 floors – ignoring the R), comparison (if we are on floor 2 and need to go down, which floor do we go to?) and measurement (height above ground floor measured in floors). Such situations also provides opportunities for generalization into other settings – the important settings of every day life!

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Introduction to Imaginary Numbers

The topic of imaginary numbers is one of the most abstract and therefore difficult math topics to teach in algebra. Here is how I introduce it to students (emphasis that this is only an introduction).

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I write 1, 2, 3… on the board (see photo above) and explain to the student “at some point in life you learned to count on your fingers, 1, 2, 3…” These are called the Natural numbers.

toddler counting

Then I explain, “later you were told that no cookies means ZERO cookies. Zero is a new type of number. We call 0, 1, 2, 3… the Whole numbers. You learned a new type of number.”

This continues, “A little later on you were told you could have half a cookie and so you learned about a new type of numbers called fractions.”

This continues with negatives. Then I explain that all these number types can be found on the number line. We call the set of all of these numbers Real Numbers.

I conclude with “Now we have a new type of numbers that are not found on the number line. These are called imaginary numbers. Just like before you had number types you had before and now you have a new one to learn.”

The point of this approach is to help the students understand that a new number set simply builds on previous number sets. Also, the students have encountered this situation before.

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