A Teacher’s View: Pi Day Makes Math Engaging for Students — and Demonstrates Math’s Importance in the World Outside the Classroom
March 13, 2019
By: Jane Porath
Source: The 74
I’ve taught math for 23 years, and that’s meant 23 Pi Days. Every year, people make puns about pizza pies and fruit pies and the number pi. Yet past the fun associated with March 14, I’ve found that Pi Day is an opportunity to help students learn how to solve problems in the classroom and throughout the world around them.
Pi Day is a way to engage students in a fun, timely, and relatable way. Every teacher understands the constant challenge of making our subjects and lessons engaging for kids, and Pi Day provides a natural hook for math. I teach eighth-grade math, geometry and algebra 1 – and pi is important in all these subjects. In my classroom, students explore how pi is related to working with anything circular. Technology provides a great opportunity to engage students and to explore how the area and volume of these various shapes are related to each other. And in our everyday lives, pi has enabled us to learn about the big sphere called Earth that we all live on, and how inventors from centuries ago through today were able to understand how these relationships work to create the circular and spherical things we use daily.