Best Math Lesson Ever

Okay, all you math people…please don’t be offended by this statement, but math is boring. Maybe that’s why we are told to count sheep to fall asleep—it’s coma inducing. Apparently this disdain for math is the dominant gene, because I’m married to a banker who got his undergrad in accounting and his master’s in business banking. I’m snoring just thinking about what he does every single day at work. Don’t get me wrong, I’m grateful he loves numbers. But I obviously passed this horrid, math despising, genetic curse onto all three of my children. On the upside, a love for all things science is also dominant and my children inherited that from yours truly too.

I think part of the trouble, with math, is the way workbook pages and flashcards have taken over. There is nothing exciting about workbook pages…for any subject. But math seems to have gotten the short end of the “fun stick” when it comes to traditional education. Thankfully, homeschooling affords us the time and freedom to take some seriously amazing field trips. Our latest experience actually made math interesting to all four of the math adverse individuals in our family.

My husband, our three kids, and I went to iFly, an indoor skydiving facility, and my children actually had the chance to fly indoors. And yes, this experience turned into an incredible hands-on math lesson. Because my kids love to learn, they ask an enormous number of questions wherever we go. I’m sure some of the other participants were less interested in the air flow pattern to the flight tube and the inherent strength of the mesh flooring, but my kids were intrigued. The instructor was more than willing to spend extra time with my kiddos and explained how four turbine engines, located above the flight tube, suck a tremendous amount of air through a system of chambers that make four sharp 90 degree angle turns, passing over a cooling system, so your flight doesn’t resemble a freefall over the Sahara. The air is then sucked back up through the turbines and starts the process all over.

We learned that even though it feels like the iFly system is “blowing” the flyer upwards, the reality is you are actually “sucked” upwards. It was fun to watch the monitor as it changed the wind speed based on the size of each of my kids. For some reason this whole experience reminded me of the movie “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory” when Charlie and his grandfather are floating around and have to burp in order to descend, but that was not the way my kids made their way back to the mesh flooring inside the tube. The whole experience took about an hour and a half. Each of the kids only flew for two minutes, the rest of the time was spent learning about the system and how each little body movement impacts the way your body ascends or descends.

I remember sitting in math classes and wondering how any of the information I was learning would be useful in life outside the classroom. If I would have known that there was potential, within all those numbers, for me to actually fly without wings…I would surely have paid closer attention. I want my kids to have the ability to see how math is used in everyday life. I want them to understand how math is used in finances, construction, and every other aspect of our existence. I want them to be excited to learn about numbers. If they know that each worksheet will take them closer to understanding how to create amazing machines, I’m pretty sure there will be a little less resistance when it is time to do the less exciting math work. I have a long way to go in order to get them prepared to live on their own, but each “aha” moment takes us one step closer to creating a foundation of information that they can draw from as they encounter new experiences.