Find the Mean Like You MEAN It

In class this week, we focused on grade 11 college math.  This is the course that is generally taken by people who know they do not want to go to university, but are rather headed into a college course.  Two of my colleagues presented lessons for this course and I'd like to talk about the lesson on mean, median, and mode.

I really liked this lesson overall!  My colleague began by using the Smart Board to display a worksheet that tackled the definitions of mean, median, and mode, and how to find each.  This gave the students a good review as mean, median, and mode are first taught in elementary school.  At this point she could have just given the students textbook homework to practice these concepts, but instead she used a card game called "Find the Mean Like You MEAN It"

Found at: https://blog.prepscholar.com/hs-fs/hubfs/Body_mean.jpg?t=1517604014667&width=325&name=Body_mean.jpg

She took all the face cards (and jokers) out of the decks so that we (the students) had decks with cards from Ace (one) to 10.  In groups of 3 or 4, we had to shuffle the cards, and deal 7 cards to each player.  Each player had to find the mean of their cards and write it down.  After 3 rounds, each player had to find the mean of the 3 rounds, and the person with the highest mean won the game.

The game was then repeated only instead of using mean, we could use median or mode.  It's an excellent method to get the students practicing!

This was only part of the lesson, so my colleague didn't mention it, but I do hope that students would also be set textbook questions to do.  After all, on a test, you won't have a deck of cards and you might have word problems that will only be solved successfully if the students have had practice with word problems.

I do like the idea of fun and games in math class, but I also stress that rote practice is useful as well.  Completely doing away with textbook questions is not a good idea in my opinion.  I hope to be able to strike that balance in my classroom.  Some topics will lend well to games, others may simply be better learned through pencil and paper practice.  But I've come a long way even to say that, because before this course, I would have said that all topics are best learned through pencil and paper practice.  It's been great learning about the different ways students can learn and practice math in the classroom.