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velvetpageA quick post, relatively, because I'm short on time and energy and there are kids screaming right outside my classroom window.
A couple of weeks ago, we started the book, "If the World Were a Village." Last Thursday, we got to the page about the most common languages in the global village. The page gave the breakdown of the number of people out of one hundred villagers who speak each of the eight most common languages in the world. The breakdown is as follows:
Chinese - 22, 18 of them Mandarin
English - 9
Hindi - 9
Spanish - 7
Bengali - 4
Arabic - 4
Portuguese - 3
Russian - 3
I was using this to teach the concept of the double bar graph. So I put these numbers up on chart paper and suggested to the class that we compare them to the native languages of our own class.
We came across a problem with Chinese. The only Chinese girl in the class has a Chinese father and a Vietnamese mother. She speaks both languages. So we put up an extra category for Vietnamese and went on. English wasn't too hard; 48% of my class speaks English as a their first (and in most cases, only) language.
Then we came across the biggest snag.
I have several Indian kids in my classroom. I also have several Pakistani kids. Between the nine kids who fall into one of these two categories, their are four languages with varying levels of mutual comprehension: Hindi, Urdu, Punjabi, and another form of Punjabi that is apparently incomprehensible to the speakers of the first form but which everyone agrees still goes by the same name. The Hindi people were willing to admit that the Pakistanis spoke a dialect of Hindi that they called Urdu, but the Pakistanis wouldn't give ground on the matter at all; yes, they understand the Hindi kids, but their language is a different language. All nine of them agreed as to why: India and Pakistan had been at war off and on for so long that no one in Pakistan wanted anything to do with India, while the Indians were always quick to point out that Pakistan USED TO BE part of India.
We finally separated out the concepts of race, religion, nationality, and language, pointing out that the four overlap quite a bit but they are not the same thing. We decided to discount race entirely (I admit to pushing that decision a little bit.) We came to the conclusion that the reason the different dialects of English are all called English is that there's no political reason to call them anything else, whereas the tensions between Pakistan and India make people of both countries want to separate their language from each other.
Then we brought it back around to math, pointing out that the author of the book probably made a decision to count Urdu as a dialect of Hindi, and count them all together, whereas in our classroom, we'd separated them for political reasons. The big understanding that came out of the discussion was that numbers can be used in different ways. Sometimes, to make a graph or some other representation of numbers, we have to simplify them, and sometimes when we simplify them, we lose some of their meaning. If the reader puts too much store in the simplified numbers, misunderstandings can happen as a result.
Next up: a bar graph comparing our class' level of access to electronics to the number in the global village. Part of that discussion will involve the word "privilege."
In other news, there's a correlation between the number of computers my students have access to and their success in school. Last year, only 60% of my kids had a computer at home, and several of those lacked internet access. Their scores on the standardized testing two years before were abysmal. This year, all but one of my kids has access to internet at home (if they're telling the truth, and I'm pretty sure they are.) Their scores on the testing were much, much higher, and they generally perform better.
A couple of weeks ago, we started the book, "If the World Were a Village." Last Thursday, we got to the page about the most common languages in the global village. The page gave the breakdown of the number of people out of one hundred villagers who speak each of the eight most common languages in the world. The breakdown is as follows:
Chinese - 22, 18 of them Mandarin
English - 9
Hindi - 9
Spanish - 7
Bengali - 4
Arabic - 4
Portuguese - 3
Russian - 3
I was using this to teach the concept of the double bar graph. So I put these numbers up on chart paper and suggested to the class that we compare them to the native languages of our own class.
We came across a problem with Chinese. The only Chinese girl in the class has a Chinese father and a Vietnamese mother. She speaks both languages. So we put up an extra category for Vietnamese and went on. English wasn't too hard; 48% of my class speaks English as a their first (and in most cases, only) language.
Then we came across the biggest snag.
I have several Indian kids in my classroom. I also have several Pakistani kids. Between the nine kids who fall into one of these two categories, their are four languages with varying levels of mutual comprehension: Hindi, Urdu, Punjabi, and another form of Punjabi that is apparently incomprehensible to the speakers of the first form but which everyone agrees still goes by the same name. The Hindi people were willing to admit that the Pakistanis spoke a dialect of Hindi that they called Urdu, but the Pakistanis wouldn't give ground on the matter at all; yes, they understand the Hindi kids, but their language is a different language. All nine of them agreed as to why: India and Pakistan had been at war off and on for so long that no one in Pakistan wanted anything to do with India, while the Indians were always quick to point out that Pakistan USED TO BE part of India.
We finally separated out the concepts of race, religion, nationality, and language, pointing out that the four overlap quite a bit but they are not the same thing. We decided to discount race entirely (I admit to pushing that decision a little bit.) We came to the conclusion that the reason the different dialects of English are all called English is that there's no political reason to call them anything else, whereas the tensions between Pakistan and India make people of both countries want to separate their language from each other.
Then we brought it back around to math, pointing out that the author of the book probably made a decision to count Urdu as a dialect of Hindi, and count them all together, whereas in our classroom, we'd separated them for political reasons. The big understanding that came out of the discussion was that numbers can be used in different ways. Sometimes, to make a graph or some other representation of numbers, we have to simplify them, and sometimes when we simplify them, we lose some of their meaning. If the reader puts too much store in the simplified numbers, misunderstandings can happen as a result.
Next up: a bar graph comparing our class' level of access to electronics to the number in the global village. Part of that discussion will involve the word "privilege."
In other news, there's a correlation between the number of computers my students have access to and their success in school. Last year, only 60% of my kids had a computer at home, and several of those lacked internet access. Their scores on the standardized testing two years before were abysmal. This year, all but one of my kids has access to internet at home (if they're telling the truth, and I'm pretty sure they are.) Their scores on the testing were much, much higher, and they generally perform better.