Music and a math problem

In watching the attached video, you can hear the lunch bell ring at the end of period two about a minute (or so) into the song.

Kyle, who we can assume left Ms. Jung’s foods classroom as the bell was ringing, makes it to his place behind the drum kit sometime later (arrival time will be indicated in the player bar at the bottom).

I’m not a math teacher, but can see the problem solving involved at interpreting every level of this scenario:

  • How far is it from Ms. Jung’s class to mine?
  • How quickly do students fill the hallways following the lunch bell?
  • How fast is Kyle travelling, if he knows there are drums waiting to be played somewhere in the school?
  • As a hallway becomes more crowded (and at what rate does this happen?), how does the flow of traffic affect a traveller (and does their direction of travel matter)?

There are plenty of other metrics and statistics that can be applied to this fragment of recorded data that we have in the Youtube video that makes me wonder what would happen if our school’s various math classes were assigned to calculate Kyle’s average speed, and set out to discover the other resultant facts about the world we inhabit intimately every day.

There would need to be field researchers to look into the variables associated with gathering crowds, theorists to devise formulae, groups to brainstorm the various ways to interpret the available truths in the documented evidence, and innumerable other ways that reveal the hidden numerical, statistical machinery that lies behind things, and in this manner so to reveal the essence of mathematics.

In a matter of weeks, the fundamental elements that drive high school math could go about involving a hundred students, and more than a few teachers in statistically, probabilistically, and mathematically recreating Kyle’s mad dash between the foods and choir classrooms.

This too closely reminds me of when I briefly introduced the theory of plate tectonics to a group of Humanities 9 students setting out to discover the geography of North America. I told them that what is now British Columbia, and much of the Western continental shelf had originally been a part of Asia, and had drifted across the Pacific before colliding with Alberta, Idaho, Colorado, and creating the impact residue we know as the Rocky Mountains. After I had let this idea sink in, I happened to be standing behind two fourteen year old boys who marvelled at one another:

Can you imagine if you were standing there, when that first happened?!

It can be said that neither of the two young gentlemen in question were particularly successful in my course – and were likely not prized math scholars either. But they were excited about this: the idea of finding out what happened when our continent was formed. This characterization pleased a friend of mine, who is working toward his PhD in Geology, and spends the majority of his working year applying mathematics to the history of our continent.

“Basically,” he said, when I told him about the boys being keen to get back to that initial moment of impact. “That’s what I do.”

And what Reid does is math.

It all kind of makes me wish that our school’s didn’t have bells, or walls dividing subjects.

To be clear, I’m no math teacher – and even took Math 12 twice, earning 80% each time. But even with as much as I know about Pythagorean theorems and sin waves, I don’t find myself wondering about how far away a hot air balloon is all that much from day to day (in fact, chances are that if I had a friend in that hot air balloon, our phones could tell us our distances in elevation, the vertical ground between us, one another, Paris, France… the list goes on).

But I want to know about this.

Do you?

What can you tell me about Kyle’s run for the drums?

4 thoughts on “Music and a math problem

  1. Mr.J, I think you are on the right track, bringing excitement and relevance into the current Math curriculum, music and math together?…Did Kyle have the time to make a pit stop before going into your classroom? How long could he have taken? When children are curious about something they want to learn more about it…

  2. Thanks for the comment, Anyes.

    I like the various elements that could be added to the problem: if he stopped, for how long? Who did he talk to? What can we know (generally / statistically) about how long hallway conversations last?

    The Talons were working on vectors and other introductory physics on Friday afternoon that gave me a little extra incentive to share this idea for a problem – and got Ms. M and I talking about ways to work similar investigations into the class’ math study.

    It will be interesting to see what they come up with, for sure!

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