English teachers are paying attention to and discussing the mathematics that show up in literature, relating math to sets and costumes in drama, using mathematics to support persuasive arguments in speech and when writing papers, making connections between logical thinking and clear writing using logic problems, and having students calculate their grades.

Physical education and health teachers as well as coaches have students figuring target heart rate ranges, BMI and Basal Metabolism. They are making sure that students are able to keep scores accurately in all sports and calculate statistics in those sports.

Foreign language teachers not only include counting in other languages, but they have students doing math in other languages, compare populations and land sizes of other countries, and convert currencies between countries.

Business and applied technology teachers are having students figure interest, compare investment opportunities, use graphs and charts to describe data, balancing check books, figuring mortgages/loans and payments, using different number bases to explain computers and how they work, and explore vectors, mechanical relationships, and parabolic motion as they evaluate the efficiency of machines.

Music teachers are relating math to rhythm, scales, and musical composition.

Science teachers have included in their curriculum the conversions between metric and English systems, microscope measurement, calculating the age of fossils, carbon dating, graphing, calculating the number of elements in a compound molecule, prairie and forest density and dominance studies, river macro invertebrate biotic index, stream discharge, environmental economics with cost/benefit analysis, calculations with BTU’s, watts, joules, moles, etc., compute populations, complete genetics problems, use formulas to model data that students collect, and estimate, predict and calculate important information dealing with physical situations.

Family and consumer science teachers point out that they are using math to counting calories, measuring ingredients, calculating calories burned, changing recipes (making them larger or smaller), measuring fabric and altering patterns, calculating day care costs for children, and developing personal and household budgets.

Math teachers made a concerted effort to integrate other content areas into math problems, making the problems more visibly connected to other contexts. Some examples included calculating tips for a restaurant meal, determining the slopes of roofs, adjusting recipes, exploring elections using statistics, modeling real life data from many content areas with mathematical functions to predict the future or figure out the past, calculate simple and compound interest, find the related rates between two objects that are moving at the same time in different directions, calculate the amount of materials needed to complete a project, use similarity to rind and use ratios between actual and scale models/objects and their magnifications, and many more examples.

The NCA Math Website is providing teachers another way to share lesson ideas and find additional math content to incorporate into their content areas. http://www.district87.org/bhs/ncamath/