Welcome to "Math Tells a Story!"
A Global Learning Project for Grades 6-12: What Do the Numbers Say?
The numbers tell the story.
There are wealthy countries and there are poor countries. The disparities are great. But do your students know how that affects the lives of those who are less fortunate? Do they realize how much people must work to earn the things we take for granted? Teachers and Students: You are invited!! Students from grades 6-12 and their teachers are invited to participate in this project. Currently we are collecting prices from all over the world to help students sense the disparity and get an idea of how expensive things are relative to our own cost of living. You are invited to pick any item you wish, take a digital picture of it, and submit it to our blog with its price. It can be as simple as a pound of rice, or something as extravagant as a flat screen television. Our goal is to determine how many hours someone with an average income in that country has to work to purchase the item. Then we wish to compare it with other countries to determine how much those items would cost if we had to work that long for them. And then we examine our results. We blog, make graphs and drawings, whatever we can, to demonstrate what the numbers say. What have we learned? Email me your photos and data and I will post them on a page dedicated to your class. Post Your Data Here is a forum for students to post their data and photos and links of their research on prices. The "Let's Analyze and Discuss Your Data" tab is a blog page discussing the data we gathered above. Most importantly, we want to get an idea of how much effort in time and labor it takes to obtain those items. A pound of rice may take ten minutes for a person from a wealthy country to earn, but seven hours for the inhabitants of a poor country. |
$1,000 to fill his tank?
This is Pablito, my brother-in-law from the Dominican Republic. A tank of gas cost approximately $100 in his country. He earns about $400 per month as a graphic artist. If gas were relatively this expensive for us, it would cost us $1,000 to fill our tanks if we made $4,000 per month! Would your parents be less willing to drive you places if it cost them $50 for a gallon of gas? A 20 gallon tank of gas in the Dominican Republic may cost about $100, but it may take a week for them to earn that. Could you imagine your parents paying one-fourth of what they earn each month just to fill the gas tank? So what does a family do for transportation when gas is so expensive? They pile as many as five people onto one motorcycle. Economical, but very dangerous, as hundreds of Dominicans are killed every year riding motorcycles. This is one aspect of how poverty can shorten lives. As you participate in this project, think of other ways that life is more difficult with poverty.
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Courtesy of bryson-adams.blogspot.com