Connections

In order to engage all students in your content material, good teachers make connections to the popular interests of their students. Making sense of a text doesn’t happen randomly or spontaneously. Good readers make connections to what they already know, their experiences in the world, and to other texts. We can call it developing Spidey powers or helping students access and develop their schemata. Good teachers help students make connections, and also get to know their students’ interests and the local and popular culture in which they are living and going to school. Using popular culture can also signal to your students that you care about knowing more about what they care about.

For this assignment, you will design an activity that could be used as part of a larger unit that connects popular culture to either a topic from class or a topic in your content area. Turn in (upload to Dropbox) your lesson plan for this project. For the presentation component of this assignment, describe how you would carry out this lesson. How you construct your demonstration is up to you. In addition to the demonstration itself, provide us with some background on why you selected the text or texts you did and how you think the activity will fit into a larger unit of instruction. You may also spend some time reflecting on what you learned from preparing the activity and what, if anything, you might change or research more in-depth.

You may use any lesson plan template of your choice. One is provided in the Resources section of this Wiki. I am looking more for your content than how you structure the format of the lesson plan.

Plan for sharing how you would carry out this lesson and perhaps give an example in about 5 minutes.

Popular Culture Connections

English Media Literacy [] Examining Transcendentalism through Popular Culture []

History Teaching World History through Popular Culture [] Using Popular Culture To Teach About Japan [] Integrating Music in History Education []

Science Where Science meets Popular Culture [] Using Pop Culture to Introduce Biology []

Math Math in popular culture (Talk of the Nation/Science Friday) [] Websites: Mathematics In Various Media Mathematics in Music: Mathematics as Art: Websites: Curriculum And Lesson Plans Books (mathematics as popular culture)
 * [|Television show "Numb3rs"]
 * [|A guide to Mathematics in the Movies]
 * [|Mathematics in][|Futurama]
 * [|Mathematics in][|The Simpsons]
 * Math Comics:[|http://www.mathcartoons.com/fogelfroe.html;]http://www.trottermath.net/humor/cartoons.html; []
 * "That's Mathematics," Tom Lehrer, sung with "[|Funny Math Problems]"
 * "[|New Math]," by Tom Lehrer--Look closely at the process involved in this subtraction problem. Is it really as complicated as he makes it seem?
 * [|Rhythms and Ratios]
 * [|Songs for Teaching Math]
 * [|"Math is a Wonderful Thing,"]by Jack Black
 * M.C. Escher,[]
 * [|Art and Architecture]
 * Sources for Number Activities
 * [|National Geographic Interactive Consumption Calculator]
 * [|The Simpsons]
 * [|Stand and Deliver]
 * [|Donald in Mathmagic Land]
 * [|Lewis Carroll]
 * [|Math Sports Project]
 * [|Sir Cumference books]
 * Lasky, Katherine, [|The Librarian who Measured the Earth]
 * Scieszka, Jon,[|The Math Curse]
 * Tang, Gregory,[|The Grapes of Math]