INFINITY TEACHING IDEAS

There Was a Young Man From Trinity

There was a young man from Trinity,

Who solved the square root of infinity.

While counting the digits,

He was seized by the fidgets,

Dropped science, and took up divinity.

-Anonymous (Maletsky, 1987).

The poem found above is just one way that we thought we could introduce Infinity to our students. Alternatively, you may want to begin with some thought-provoking questions, such as:

-What's the biggest number you can think of? What will happen if you add one more? And one more?

-How many times can you skate around a figure 8? -Where is the beginning? The end?

-What would you buy if you won Infinity dollars?

-How many stars are in the sky?

-How many grains of sand are on a beach?

-What's the smallest creature that you know? How small is a creature one half it's size? One quarter?

-How long has the earth been around?

Furthermore, you may want to use an activity, such as setting up two mirrors opposite each other and asking, How many reflections are behind the child?, How many are in front? And how many in all? (Jarema, 2007).

As we began to inquire about Infinity we discovered a variety of children's books that could be used as tools to bridge mathematics and language arts and to deepen students' understandings of the issue (See children's books section in table of contents). In fact, this sparked a plan for a thematic unit on Infinity utilizing those areas, as well as art, social studies, and science.

Infinity presents an opportunity for the use of patterns and fractals (Barratt, 2006) in art, as well as the vanishing point (point of infinity) used in working with perspective (Wikipedia). Social studies can be incorporated by grouping students and letting each group participate in a biographical inquiry of a famous contributor to Infinity of their choice (such as Georg Cantor, John Wallis, etc.). This will be a great way to make history come alive for students, as well as a chance for them to learn about multiple perspectives. The aspects of time and space are directly related to scientific concepts in the areas of physics, chemistry, biology, astronomy, and astrology. We will let students begin with their own question about Infinity and then ask them to design their own experiment, using the scientific method, to test their hypotheses.

In language arts, we would use a variety of the books that we found to employ techniques, such as literature circles, choral reading, buddy reading, the language experience approach, journal writing, and author's chair, etc. to get students thinking, talking and writing about their views of infinity. In regards to teaching Infinity in math class, our main focus will be an interactive environment where children learn how to learn through collaboration. Depending on the grade level, we may use problems of sets, and limits, and at the very least will take up the study of geometry, algebra, number sense, chaos theory, and paradoxes. The frustrating/fascinating nature of the topic will no doubt cause students to grapple with, and cling to Infinity's many facets.