Context
I teach middle school mathematics at a Chicago Public School where the population consists of 680 Chinese and African American students from pre-kindergarten through eighth grades. Over 95% of our students receive free or reduced lunch, and most eat 2-3 meals per day at school. This makes food an issue very much tied to their school experiences, and it is also an important cultural component of many of their lives. Approximately 7% of our student population has IEPs to accommodate learning disabilities, and 75% are English Language Learners. The dominant language of origin is Cantonese. I designed this unit for my 8th grade general mathematics course, but it has the flexibility to be tailored to shift the main focus to a science or language arts course as well.
Students often struggle in middle school mathematics because the focus on computation in the younger grades overrides the emphasis on thinking, reasoning, and explaining that is the cornerstone of my curriculum. Often, students have never been given a problem to solve that they did not already know how to do; traditional mathematics teaching provides a sample problem, gives students the algorithm, and provides practice problems that replicate the process they were shown. This unit is purposely designed to force students to find and apply the mathematics where it is needed and fits into their quest to come up with solutions to their food problems.
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