Thursday 6 October 2011

Made up Maths Words

I'm a big fan of creative literacy, generally with a maths focus.  What I'm worried about is whether it may do more harm than good.

Some examples; from recent lessons, to things from a while ago...

Shape names:  I asked a class if they knew the name of a 12 sided polygon. After a sea of blank faces presented itself, I prompted "it begins with D".  Dozenagon was the answer offered.  So, for the rest of the lesson we used Dozenagon alongside the proper name.


Same lesson, outterior angles.  Opposite of interior, in case you were wondering!

I've also used squillimeters and squentimetres for sq mm and sq cm.  This helps avoid the centimetres squared problem. Many students don't appreciate the difference until I tell the (both true) stories of the tech teacher who ordered 10 metres squared of turf for his 10 sq metre garden, and the one (from the telly I'm told) who ordered 5 metres cubed of concrete to be poured on to the floor that required 5 cubic metres.  They certainly know the difference.

I've also verbised words.  Y12/13 in particular use the verbs To Pythagorise and To Trigonometrise to describe what to do to a forces or vector triangle.  Bracketising is something I use as a synonym for factorising.

The question is does it matter?  I am always careful to use the real word too, but I feel it is part of building up a good relationship for learning with pupils, and a few years ago some of a class startd keeping a list of made up words in the back of their books. I tried to get them to create a wiki for it, but the VLE didn't make it easy enough, which is a shame as it would be great to have a full record of words over the year.

All thoughts always gratefully received!

3 comments:

  1. I use made up words all the time, and welcome them from kids, but I make absolutely sure that they know and are able to use the 'proper' words when called upon. Making up words and phrases can be a great way of embedding the concepts surrounding them more solidly into the mind, and provide hooks and handles for recalling them.

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  2. Nice blog! I like 'outterior'.

    I do three things that are relevant:

    1. I make up words, some mathematical other not like "scissorate" and "Pritterise" for cutting and sticking!
    2. I have set phrases that I always use in specific contexts like "It's a cross, so cross things out" and "Leave it, change it, flip it" for multiplying and dividing fractions. All of my standard sayings are on laminated signs hanging from the ceiling. Pupils will often look or point and some write out the stock phrases in exams. I had an email the other week from a pupil who left two years ago who was so pleased to have remembered the second of the above phrases in a test, and got the question right, that she wanted to tell me!
    3. I pride myself on having a good vocabulary and when I stray beyond that of even my brightest year eights I will regularly have a cross-curricular grammar/vocab moment and set them the challenge of using that word correctly in their English lessons. The most recent such word was 'lucid' and an email came from a colleague marking quite late one night who realised after the third pupil had used the same unusual word that I might have had something to do with it!

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  3. Love all of the above. Scissorate and Pritterise are now officially in my dictionary! I also love part 3 above, and now intend to be a better cross curricular teacher!

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