PLANNING

I teach a food protection course for Intermediate/Advanced ESOL students who want to be food handlers. I prepare them by teaching food protection vocabulary used for the course. I also teach them English language reading, writing, speaking, and listening. At the end of the term, food protection instructors from Kingsborough Community College train my students for about one week, then students take the food protection certification examinations. If they pass, they get the food protection license which allows them to start a food business in New York or work as supervisors/managers in food establishments. One of our students’ goals is to pass the certification test. They can also choose to continue with their studies and take High School Equivalency preparation classes.

With this problem, I wanted to integrate math instruction with food safety. The math problem is about Escherichia coli (E. coli), a type of bacteria, which is one of the topics covered in the Food Handler Course my students are taking. The presence of microorganisms in foods has caused many to be sick. Students taking the Food Handler Course are taught how to protect their customers from eating foods contaminated by microorganisms. In this problem, my students saw firsthand how the E. Coli bacteria multiplies. They noted reasons why a food worker does his or her best to prevent the multiplication of bacteria in the food we eat.

PLANNING

I chose this problem because I love the visual nature and the puzzle-like feel to it. I think the visual clues will help students better understand the concept of area. The ideas of ratio and relationship are important here because it’s impossible to get the answer to this question without comparing the different sizes of squares of different colors. It was also easy to pull in the concept of area as sort of an anchor to bring the other aspects of the question together. This image came from an email sent out by Stanford mathematics educator Jo Boaler as a conversation starter – “What kind of math questions can we generate from an image like this?”

This resource has students making sense of data tracking the history of the cost of bread in the US and the history of the Federal minimum wage. There options of sense-making activities for teachers to choose from. This set of activities is a great opportunity for teachers to integrate math and social studies.

All the materials for this problem are available in this Google folder. Read on for recommendations for teaching this problem.

This lesson now includes translated graphs, slides, and handouts translated to Spanish (see link above). Thank you to Jose Adorno and Connie Rivera from Connecticut adult education.

I have been teaching lessons from the CUNY HSE Math Curriculum Framework: Problem Solving in Functions & Algebra, starting with The Commission Problem (link to previous post). The Cab Fare Problem is the next lesson I taught.  I presented the question to the students as follows. Continue reading how Cheryl Ann Stokkeland used The Cab Fare Problem in class »

Starting with the 2018/2019 school year, I decided to try my hand at the CUNY HSE Math Curriculum Framework. I started with Unit 1 so that students would have a better understanding of functions and working through problems to determine the rule needed to complete the table. I taught the taxi problem from Unit 2 as the next lesson. This will also written up as a separate Math Memo. Continue reading how Cheryl Ann Stokkeland used The Commission Problem in class »