Ohio Journal of School Mathematics | Issue: Issue: 1(79) Summer 2018 (2018)

Volume 79 • 2018 • Summer 2018

Several of these articles work to give mathematics a setting before asking anyone to do it. Druken and Frazin send future teachers out to pick a spot in their own community, mark five trail heads, and model whatever real situations they find there. Wernet pushes back on the old line that students hate story problems, drawing on interviews and surveys in two 7th-grade classrooms to argue that the right context is what makes a task worth the trouble. Gold makes a quieter version of the same case: Ohio’s new financial literacy standards belong folded into the elementary curriculum already in place, not bolted on as a separate unit.

The issue also runs an unusual streak of student-written picture books about mathematicians. King and Rhyal each take the thin historical record of Euclid and build a story from it, one a wizard’s journey and the other a dilemma set in the court of King Ptolemy; Paul writes a tribute to Paul Erdős and the collaborative life he led. Alongside the storytelling sits steadier work. Iobst feels his way through Desmos by trial and error until single equations draw squares, triangles, and trapezoids, and Banting builds an evolutionary metaphor of fittest versus fitness out of one student’s unexpected trigonometric argument.