The Wizard of Oz … in my mathematics class?

Pooja Keshavan Singh

Reena has been teaching mathematics in primary school for the last three years. She always explores new ways to engage her learners. In her short teaching stint she has realized that her young learners are most excited during their storytelling sessions. She says, “Many a time children do not want to do the activities that I plan for them, but these same children do not blink their eyes when they are told a story during language teaching.” She recently started exploring the idea of teaching mathematics using stories.

According to Zazkis and Liljedahl (2009), stories are one of the most powerful cognitive tools to engage the imagination of students. Imagination is closely linked to our emotions in complex ways (Egan 2005). So, if we are to engage students with math, there must be an emotional dimension to our teaching. This concept is unheard of in mathematics teaching. Where is the scope for imagination and emotions? Right?

Wrong!

When we say math is abstract, we understand its abstraction by imagining its concepts and ideas. The entire organization takes place in the mind, starting from imagining numbers to placing them on a number line, to imagining an arbitrary symbol to represent something or someone or to imagining the chances of an event. All of this is imagination (Balakrishnan2008).

There is growing evidence pointing to the effectiveness of using stories to teach mathematics. Some point to the role of fantasy, some to the power of narratives and real life situations and some attribute it to the student’s agency that they get during problem solving. We can analyze these reasons through research over time but the one thing common to all of these is that the students take these story situations seriously and that is why the problem solving becomes something that they want to do from something that they have to do.

Let me explain how this happens in the classroom. Reena took the popular story of The Wizard of Oz (by Frank Baum) She chose this story because the main character, Dorothy, is a girl the same age as her students. Dorothy leaves home with her dog Toto because she is angry with her family. This story is about her journey back home during which she makes many friends and meets the Wizard of Oz. Reena modified the storyline to teach the concept of division to her class. The first problem was as follows.

Dorothy lives with her uncle and aunt and is good in mathematics. She often helps her uncle in his farm work. Her uncle has two farms. One farm has six divisions and the other eight divisions. One day her uncle brings 24 packets of seeds for each farm and wants to evenly distribute them in his farms. He is confused and not sure how to do this. He asks Dorothy to help but she finds 24 packets too many to calculate. So Reena asks her students to help Dorothy. She gives her students worksheets with two equal rectangles, one with eight equal divisions and another with six equal divisions.

The students begin inventing ways to divide the seed packets to help Dorothy. Some randomly assign two packets to each division. Reena points out that of the 24 packets for each farm eight are left unused in the first and twelve in the second. One student starts putting one packet in each division and finishes with eight and six respectively and then he starts again. This way the students realize that in the farm with eight divisions, three seed packets have to be used in each division and in the other, four seed packets have to be used in each division.

All this is done without a hint that they are doing ‘division’ because the children seem to dislike it. They are comfortable with addition and subtraction and so the teacher uses that to build a base for equal division.

Dorothy’s story continues for the next eight classes during which the students learn to divide through repeated subtraction and equal grouping, understand the relation of multiplication with division, learn to use the division symbol, make division sentences and interchange them with multiplication, invent the division algorithm and solve word problems. All this while they are in fact helping Dorothy survive the ordeals of her journey back home. They befriend the Tin man, the Scarecrow, and the Lion, meet the Wizard of Oz only to realize that all the time during mathematics class they were doing division when they thought it was ‘so hard’. Coincidentally, the story of the Wizard of Oz also offers a similar message.

Stories catch our imagination and that is why they are so engaging. Their potential can be harnessed for teaching mathematics so that our students realize and manipulate mathematical ideas for reasons true to them and not the teacher or the curriculum.

References
• Balakrishnan, C. (2008). Unpublished Manuscript. Downloaded on 20 August 2014 from, http://www.peterliljedahl.com/wpcontent/uploads/Thesis-Chandra-Balakrishnan.pdf.

• Egan, K. (2005). An imaginative approach to teaching. San Francisco: John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

• Zazkis, R., &Liljedahl, P. (2009). Teaching mathematics as storytelling (eds.). Sense Publisher. Rotterdam.

The author teaches courses in mathematics pedagogy in the Department of Elementary Education, Jesus and Mary College, University of Delhi to undergraduate students. Her interests include innovating math teaching and inclusive education. She can be reached at poojakeshavan@yahoo.com.