Lying awake in bed last night, I did some real-life maths: how long was it before I had to get up for Mass? As the sleepless hours ticked by, the answer to that question became smaller and smaller.
After I emerged from the bathroom after this morning’s shower, I said, “Andy, we forgot to pick up some money for the collection.”
My husband yawned, despite a good night’s sleep, and slid back the bed quilt, saying, “We really should organise a weekly direct debit payment. Perhaps there are details about how we can do that in the entrance to the church.”
I looked through my purse, and Andy searched his pockets. After counting a lot of one and two dollar coins and adding them to a couple of notes, we managed to find enough money for the collection.
Just minutes before leaving our house, I grabbed my notebook and pen, and Andy asked, “Writing down your latest idea?”
I replied, “No, I’m recording today’s weather, the expected high and low temperatures. You know how, when we look back, we forget whether it was a warm or cold year? Well, I’ll be able to check the weather in my notebook.”
“You do know you can get all the past weather records online?”
“Yes, but having all the temperatures in my journal feels more personal.”
As soon as I’d written 13 – 24 degrees C, partly cloudy, we hurried out the front door towards the car.
“It’s cool!” I exclaimed, shrugging on my jacket.
“It’s only 14 degrees,” said Andy, a moment later, looking at his car’s dashboard.
“It feels like autumn is coming,” I said. “The days are getting shorter. There’s only 17 days of summer left.”
Andy’s car told us how far it was to our church and how long it would take us to get there. And I thought about how much real-life maths we’d used, and it was only 7:20 am.
The world is full of maths, isn’t it? Most times, we use maths and don’t even realise it.
Years ago, my daughters Sophie and Gemma-Rose and I set out to discover maths in our homeschooling day. We put on our maths eyes and became maths detectives.
I wrote a blog post about all the maths we spied, Becoming Real Life Maths Detectives:
“We use maths all the time,” I say to my daughter Gemma-Rose (10). “Maths is everywhere.”
Everywhere? She doesn’t look convinced.
“You use maths to count your money,” says Sophie, “and when you’re cooking.”
Cooking? How many times have you heard this example when real life maths is mentioned? “Real life maths? You know, cooking.”
My girls cook all the time. I have lots and lots of cooking entries in my homeschool records book. They all say similar things: my girls measured the mass and volume of solid and liquid ingredients. They used grams and maybe kilograms, metric cups, millilitres and litres. They multiplied and divided. They recognised fractions. They used the oven and noted the temperature in degrees Celsius. Yes, there’s a lot of maths there. But real life maths isn’t only about cooking…
You could read the rest of the story:
The other day, I also made a Shorts video about real-life maths.
And there’s a challenge in my book, The Unschool Challenge, called Be a Real-Life Maths Detective:
“We use maths all the time.”
“Kids will learn maths because they need it for everyday life.”
Have you ever heard people say these things, but you haven’t been convinced? Perhaps the problem is that, although maths surrounds us, we fail to see it. We don’t look properly. But once we put on our maths eyes, it’s obvious that maths is everywhere!
There’s one real-life maths problem I haven’t worked out: how much sleep did I get last night? I daren’t do the maths. The answer might make me feel even more tired than I am. Sometimes, it’s good to ignore real-life maths opportunities that come our way. We don’t have to work everything out, do we?
So, what do you think?
Looking back through your day, how much maths can you discover?
