Is simpler always better? The rapper Jay-Z once described how he “dumbed down for my audience to double my dollars.” Indeed, a recent analysis found that the average top-rated pop song is written at a third-grade reading level.
In this lesson, students evaluate expressions with variables to compare the reading levels of famous speeches in American history and debate the virtues of complexity vs. popularity.
Students will
Evaluate expressions at specific values of their variables
Before you begin
Students will evaluate a formula with variables; they do not necessarily need prior experience working with variables.
How many ancestors do you have as you go back in time? Students use exponential growth to see how many people they're related to throughout human history.
How do the rules of an election affect who wins? Students calculate (as a percent) how much of the electoral and popular vote different presidential candidates have received, and add with integers to explore elections under possible alternative voting systems.
Topic:
Number System (NS), Ratios and Proportional Relationships (RP), Reasoning with Equations and Inequalities (REI)
How many calories does a body burn? Students interpret and apply the formula for resting metabolic rate (RMR) in order to learn about how calories consumed from food, calories burned from exercise, and calories burned automatically contribute to a body's weight.
Topic:
Expressions and Equations (EE), Ratios and Proportional Relationships (RP)
How do you determine the best scorer in basketball? Students compare LeBron James and Tyson Chandler in various ways, from total points, to points per game/minute, to a new measure called net points in order to decide.
Topic:
Number System (NS), Ratios and Proportional Relationships (RP)
What's a healthy weight? Students evaluate the Body Mass Index (BMI) formula for several celebrities, and discuss whether BMI is always a good measure of health.
Should fast food restaurants rewrite their menus in terms of exercise? Students write and evaluate expressions to determine how long it takes to burn off foods from McDonald’s and debate the pros and cons of including this information on fast food menus.
Topic:
Ratios and Proportional Relationships (RP), Expressions and Equations (EE)
How much should people pay for cable? Students interpret scatterplots and calculate the costs and revenues for consumers and providers under both the bundled and à la carte pricing schemes to determine which would be better for U.S. companies and customers.
Topic:
Number System (NS), Ratios and Proportional Relationships (RP)
How were free states and slave states represented in Congress? In this lesson, students use census data and fraction multiplication to explore the effects of the Three-Fifths Compromise on the balance of power between free and slave states in early America.
Should the U.S. get rid of the penny? Students operate with decimals to calculate the total costs to produce different U.S. coins. Students debate eliminating the penny and then consider a world with no physical money at all.
Topic:
Number System (NS)
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Mathalicious lessons provide teachers with an opportunity to teach standards-based math through real-world topics that students care about.
How have video game consoles changed over time? Students create exponential models to predict the speed of video game processors over time, compare their predictions to observed speeds, and consider the consequences as digital simulations become increasingly lifelike.
Topic:
Building Functions (BF), Interpreting Categorical and Quantitative Data (ID), Interpreting Functions (IF), Linear, Quadratic, and Exponential Models (LE), Seeing Structure in Expressions (SSE)