Bringing Community into the Classroom

Hey y'all

So as part of an assignment for my EDU223 class, we were asked to think of ways to incorporate community into our classroom and curriculum in an enriching and effective way.

As many of y'all know by now, I am a math concentration, so, being the hot mess that I am, I immediately started to panic:

HOW CAN I INCORPORATE COMMUNITY INTO MY CLASSROOM? WHAT DO YOU MEAN INCORPORATE COMMUNITY INTO MY CLASSROOM? I'M GOING TO TEACH MATH, NOT HISTORY OR ART OR ENGLISH? HOW THE HECK DO I DO THIS?

I'm going to be frank, this panic has not completely subsided, but after thinking about it some, I realized there are a couple avenues you can go down depending on your topic of study and your unit.

If you were approaching this quest of community involvement in the classroom as a statistics teacher, you could send your kids home and have them poll their family and friends about all sorts of stuff, ranging from favorite flavor of ice cream to where and and when they were born. After students return to class with their data, you could begin a lesson using the statistics they collected to teach probability, related events and the probability of an outcome,
as well as other statistics-y things (I haven't take statistics yet, so don't be too judgmental on my lack of examples on how to incorporate that data).

A project like this could meet the Common Core Mathematics standards:

CCSS.MATH.CONTENT.HSS.CP.A.2
Understand that two events A and B are independent if the probability of A and B occurring together is the product of their probabilities, and use this characterization to determine if they are independent.

CCSS.MATH.CONTENT.HSS.CP.A.5
Recognize and explain the concepts of conditional probability and independence in everyday language and everyday situations. For example, compare the chance of having lung cancer if you are a smoker with the chance of being a smoker if you have lung cancer.

CCSS.MATH.CONTENT.HSS.CP.B.6
Find the conditional probability of A given B as the fraction of B's outcomes that also belong to A, and interpret the answer in terms of the model.


As a geometry teacher, you could take a walk around down and examine the architecture of the city. Different house-styles have different features, and therefore serve different purposes. You could have your students make note of which styles of houses they see, take pictures of them and their roofs to measure the angle of the trusses used in it's construction, as well as research why different styles of houses use different roof designs and their purpose. Though this is not an activity where students directly interact with community members, it can teach students a lot about the original development of the city, the though processes behind building design, as well as the why these designs were picked over others. Additionally, this can be a great time to look at and find various geometric shapes in the community (eq circular cylinders being modeled through trees) and describing them.

A project like this can meet Common Core Mathematics Standards:

CCSS.MATH.CONTENT.HSG.MG.A.1
Use geometric shapes, their measures, and their properties to describe objects (e.g., modeling a tree trunk or a human torso as a cylinder).*

CCSS.MATH.CONTENT.HSG.MG.A.3
Apply geometric methods to solve design problems (e.g., designing an object or structure to satisfy physical constraints or minimize cost; working with typographic grid systems based on ratios).*

Additionally, if you're looking for someone to come in as a guest speaker, you could reach out to someone from the local historical society to come in and to bring in either sale-records of stores, or tax documents that students would be able to look at and go through the math of, seeing what percentages of someone's income went to groceries and/or taxes, giving students a real-world example of how people are suppose to manage their money.


Though it may not be as easy as other concentrations (looking at you English and Social Studies), there are ways to incorporate community into a math classroom. And since it's easy to panic about such things (like I am right now), the best advice I can give a fellow Secondary Ed- Mathematics major is to breathe. Math is the hardest subject, and we will get through it, even if it requires a mental break down or five. You can do it.

Breathe.

You got this.