Tying math into the real world.

What do guitars, fantasy football and a television show about a crime-solving Los Angeles FBI agent have in common? They're all part of the latest movement among math teachers to bring reality into the classroom. "We've always seen individual teachers use real-world elements to motivate students, but we're seeing more and more teachers highlighting these kinds of applications," says Cathy Seeley, president of the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics. Teachers who are using these methods agree that their students are more engaged and enjoy learning the subject.

Across the country, hundreds of teachers have learned to play the guitar and incorporate it into their lessons through an organization called Guitars in the Classroom. It offers free weekly group guitar classes to pre-K through 8th-grade teachers in different regions. The classes include basic music education and group songwriting techniques. "Rhythm is math," says Judy Ginsburgh, a music specialist in Alexandria, La., who does professional development to show teachers how to weave music into their lessons. "Music is all about counting, learning notes and their values."

Gloria Brown, an elementary learning specialist for math in the Horry County Schools in Conway, S.C., rewrites familiar songs and jingles to teach about angles and other math concepts. She says when instructors combine music and movement, students' retention increases. "If your body learns it, you learn it," she says. "If you could see the children singing 'penny, nickel, dime and quarter,'" laughs Brown. When she monitors tests, she overhears kids singing tunes written by her or her co-workers.

For Dan Flockhart, bringing football into the classroom was the way to excite his students. "The traditional pedagogy of teaching math doesn't work for millions of kids, especially those in urban areas," says Flockhart, who taught for 11 years.

Flockhart piloted the material to have students learn math by playing fantasy football for six years and says it was his most successful curriculum. When they draft fantasy football teams, students track statistics, use fractions and decimals to compute points each week and construct graphs. His new book, Fantasy Football and Mathematics, contains 46 lessons, all tied to NCTM standards.

A third way math teachers are enticing students is by tying in lessons with the CBS show NUMB3RS, which is about using math to solve crimes. Lois Coles, an eighth-grade algebra teacher at Brentwood Middle School in Brentwood, Tenn., downloaded activities from the show's web site (Texas Instruments and NCTM developed supplemental activities) and encouraged parents to watch the show with their children in her weekly parent e-newsletter. "Even if the math on the show is more advanced than what we've covered, they'll often know a part of it, which excites them," says Coles, a 26-year teaching veteran."

www.guitarsintheclassroom.com

www.fantasysportsrnath.com

www.cbs.com/numb3rs