Occasional Paper

This past year I taught math at Yadkin Early College High School in Yadkin County. Early colleges do not have athletic teams and most have few, if any, extracurricular activities because of the program’s desire to keep students focused on academics. My school, however, has several clubs in which students can participate and one of these is the dance team, which I supervise. I choreographed a dance to a mix of Lady Gaga’s “Just Dance” and Kat de Luna’s “Whine Up” and the team practiced for months trying to learn and perfect the routine so they could perform it at the end of the year. As we approached the date of the performance we had to make decisions about what they would wear during their performance. I still can’t figure out how it happened, but, by the end of the conversation, I was responsible for making skirts for the team.

This was a major task, considering my sewing skill set consisted of mostly reattaching buttons, fixing holes, and hemming pants. Regardless, the girls were counting on me to come through with skirts, and cute skirts at that. After talking with others who had more experience in skirt-making than me (which was any experience at all), I decided the easiest thing to do was to make a simple circle skirt. To do this, you essentially cut two half circles with smaller half circles cut out of the straight side and sew up the sides, creating a large circle with a smaller circle in the middle. The smaller circle in the middle is, of course, the opening for the waist. Sounds easy, right?

I decided to go forward without a pattern, mostly because I thought I could figure it out myself (I mean, I am a math teacher after all!), but also because I couldn’t find an inexpensive pattern for a circle skirt. I measured the girls’ waists one day at practice and thought by making the skirts without a store-bought pattern I could tailor the skirts for each girl. I admit I was rather ambitious for a beginner skirt-maker, but the girls were so excited about the shiny silver skirts being made just for them.

During my planning period one day, another teacher and I were sitting in our office trying to figure out how many yards of fabric I needed. We were trying to come up with an estimate, but we weren’t getting very far. It suddenly dawned on me that I could find the area, or at least diameter, of the circles and then I could easily calculate how many yards of fabric I needed to make all the skirts. I began to sketch a “pattern,” using variables to label measurements that would change, or vary, for each girl. I had the waist measurement for each girl, but quickly realized that was a circumference measurement, not a diameter, which is what I needed for my “pattern.” I plugged in the waist measurement for C in the formula for circumference (C = πd) and used algebra to find the diameter for each girl.

I was engrossed in the exciting math of it all when Robyn, the other teacher in our office, an English teacher, blurted out, “Wow! You can tell you’re a math person. I would have never done all that. It looks so complicated.” What looked complicated to her was fun, and instinctive, to me. That really got me thinking about the different ways people go about tasks and how something that seems so natural to one person might seem so foreign to someone else. I began to wonder what other everyday tasks can be handled in multiple ways. Is there always a right or wrong way? Or are there always various acceptable options? Or is every situation different?

I also wonder about what causes us to form our different perspectives. What causes us to favor math over history or express our feelings through painting instead of the written word? What significant events or people shaped our understanding of the world and how we behave in it? Why are we the way we are and what can we bring to the table?