Context In Mathematics

A bus and a car leave the same place and travelled in opposite directions. If the bus is travelling at 80 kilometres per hour and the car is travelling at 100 kilometres per hour, in how many hours will they be 210 kilometres apart? Source

But who cares? 

Week 7’s math class focused on adding context to our math lessons. The Ontario curriculum states that we should be encouraging students to use mathematical reasoning in life. In order for them to do this, we need to find was to add context into our lessons and have students care. If we can try to teach relevant problems that connect to the real world, students will see the connections to the real world can happen with math.

3 Act Math provides great examples on adding context to lessons and something I found very useful in my teaching blog. 

However, not all things in math can be taught with a real world context, which leads to the notion of pseduocontext.  Dan Meyer's website has a weekly Saturday post of math textbook questions with "real world" application claims. It is pretty interesting to read about them and try to guess what the intent of the question was. 

http://blog.mrmeyer.com

I was surprised to see this image was connected to a question about finding the area of parallelograms!