Did you hear?
This week, JJ, Thays, and Emyr were interviewed on the Leonard Lopate Show on WNYC along with journalist Amy Harmon who wrote the piece about math and friendship in The New York Times.
Due to limited mics, JJ and Thays were in studio while Emyr called in from school. You can listen to the entire live stream online, but here are some highlights from the conversation:
“I’m going to spend my entire summer doing math and only math?! My mom automatically made me go.”
“I LOVE math. I wasn’t always good at it. When I found out I was accepted to BEAM, I was excited.”
“Thays showed us a problem she was working on with binary. We had to ask 3-4 questions and she would say yes or no and she could lie only once. ”
“Yup. That was from my Hamming Code course. I learned binary, Hamming Code, Morse code.”
“As long I can remember, I have always liked math. I learned — really hard problems. Fractions, multiplying and dividing fractions inside fractions.
We also learned unsolveable problems.”
Let's talk about fractions! You might be thinking, is that actually advanced for 6th graders? As with any content, the treatment matters. There are easy fraction questions, and then there are deep, interesting questions, like the ones that JJ, Thays, and Emyr were proud to work on in their "Math Fundamentals" course. Here's a problem we love:
As you can see, the problems are designed to get students to really think about math in the context of fractions: what is true and why? The other thing that makes this questions special is that they are the type of question a teacher rarely has time to cover during the school day. At BEAM, we care less about the content (fractions) than the thinking students do and we're so glad that our students enjoy the problems in front of them!
Below are some further problems we like:
Nice work, JJ, Thays, and Emyr! It was such a pleasure to hear you talk about BEAM.
After the show, Melissa Eagan, Executive Producer of the show, gave Thays and JJ a behind the scenes tour of the studio!