Play Math!: Donuts, Lattes & more

It was a hot summer day. My cooperating teacher had handed me the keys to the classroom the day before and said he’d be around eventually to check on me. On my way in to work, I stopped by the local donut shop and ordered 2 boxes of donuts, the classic cake kind with rainbow sprinkles and varying colors of frosting. I arrived at the portable building, used the key to open the door, turned on the lights and switched on the air conditioning to mitigate both the heat and musty smell that seemed to be embedded in every surface of the room. I carefully cut each donut into pieces, laid out paper towels on each student desk and tried to steady my hands and nerves until the students all arrived.

Welcome to my first day of teaching.

“It smells good in here,” said the first student to walk in.

“Are you going to have us clean our desks today?” said another.

“I hope you have the chocolate ones in the there,” said one student who spied the boxes of donuts.

“Are you trying to bribe us to behave?”

“Wait until the teacher finds out!”

I thought I was doing okay, until that last statement filled the air. Any illusion I had that these students viewed me as their teacher was gone. Just because I had the key and was the only one old enough to vote in the room didn’t mean I was a teacher to these students.

Take a breath. Take another one, I thought to myself.

Once the room filled and the bell rang, I wrung my hands together one last time and said, “I love donuts.”

My confession that caused a few students to chuckle.

“The other day, I bought a donut with sprinkles and I felt like it just wasn’t right. There just weren’t enough sprinkles on the donut. It looked like some kid had come by and licked half of them off, or the sprinkle shaker was clogged, or the baker was in a hurry and only gave them one shake of sprinkles instead of 3.”

I took another deep breath, “So I began counting sprinkles.”

“Man, you must be lonely.” Said one kid quickly.

“Maybe,” I replied. “Mostly, I’m curious. You’ll learn that about me. I wanted to know just how many sprinkles were on that donut. But I have to tell you, it was hard to count all the sprinkles. You end up going in circles around the donut, and I couldn’t remember where I began and where to stop…I was going cross-eyed over sprinkles. And I thought, there has to be a better way.”

We had a conversation about what we could do to make it easier to count. For some reason, most of the students were ready to offer ideas. It could have been the smell of donuts, or the hope that there was a reward for good answers, or maybe it was just curiosity…their own or mine. We spent the day counting sprinkles and looking for relationships between the size of donut piece of number of sprinkles. We mapped rates, and looked for patterns, and tried to make conjectures and test them. Did chocolate frosted donuts have more sprinkles than the vanilla frosting? It sure looked like it, but was ‘looking like it’ good enough? What evidence would convince you?

The day was long. Not the longest of my career, but I remember sore feet, feeling like I was losing my voice, and wondering if I had the strength to go back for another day. I got back to my parents’ house, where I was staying until my first paycheck came through (#newteacherreality), and my dad asked about my first day of teaching. I smiled. The donuts and sprinkles worked. He started to laugh.

“What do donuts have to do with math?”

“How are they not math?” I asked back with incredulity. I tried to explain it to my dad then, as I have on numerous occasions since. Sometimes I think he gets it -- I see math everywhere. I’m like the math version of Cole Sear in Sixth Sense…but instead of seeing dead people, I see math. Is that more creepy, or less? Hmm.

Math is all around us. It’s in the numbers we see, the things we count, the shapes, lines and curves we notice, patterns, structures, artwork and symmetry. I could go on.

But I recently realized that my children don’t see math everywhere. Actually, I don’t think most people do.

My son reads every sign he sees when we’re driving. He’s in the stage where he can decode words, and it’s a revelation to him that these signs that were in plain sight for years now have meaning. He can’t stop reading them. Similarly, my daughter is learning her letters and is particularly fond of the letter S. She will shout when she sees an S in a sign, on a package at the store, or sees one as a shape in the clouds. In the same way that these naturally playful games help build early reading and literacy skills, I want to be building my children’s mathematical skills.

“This is for you. Somewhere inside you is a child who used to play with numbers, patterns and shapes. Reconnecting with your inner mathematician will improve your teaching and benefit your students, and it will also benefit you.”

Zager, T. (2017). Becoming the math teacher you wish you’d had: ideas and strategies from vibrant classrooms. Portland, ME: Stenhouse. (p. 39)

So this summer, I’m trying to up my game, for my children and perhaps for you. There’s an opportunity to learn to see math everywhere, for you and for your children.

Check out the #mathphoto18 prompts on Twitter or view some of the submissions at https://mathphoto18.wordpress.com. Each week, there is a challenge to find something mathematical in the world around you. Just like my daughter looks for “S”s, the first week of #mathphoto18 was about looking for lines. You’d be surprised just how many lines you encounter every day! Take a photo, tweet and tag it, and check out what others have found.

You might be surprised, but just by reading this post or checking out the photos, you are more likely to see math all around you --it's actually a scientific principle.

Want to up your game? I’ve found almost as much joy in not finding what the prompt is than in finding the prompt. For instance, last week was #primes…I can’t tell you how many things I counted that ended in not being a prime. While there was always a slight ting of disappointment in not fulfilling the challenge, I realized that I had a lot of curiosity around #howmany different things there were. I’ve never counted so many things in a week before. Ever. I counted chairs, lights, nail hole patterns, plants, doors, windows, people… Sometimes seeing the actual thing has to be equally important to looking for it and recognizing that I didn’t see it. Knowing whether or not it is mathematics means I’m enhancing my decision-making skills, and that’s just as important. Add a fun hashtag, like #arrayfail and enjoy realizing you didn't find what you were looking for.

This summer, you have an opportunity to record the math you see, too. Join the #mathphoto18 challenge. Talk to your kids about what you see, and what you wonder.

Recently, my parents kindly offered to watch my two little ones so that I could get a breather in. I stopped by Peet’s coffee and ordered an almond-milk latte, and was treated to this beauty: