Product Description

The authors, junior high students and best friends David and Asa, along with best-selling author Marya Washington Tyler, took the kind of gooey, slimy, disgusting science facts that students love and turned them into hilarious math problems.

When’s the last time you had your students calculate their chances of being eaten by a crocodile?

The percent of seats at Yankee Stadium that do not have gum stuck to them?

The number of skin scales they lost in the last 20 minutes?

The number of flushes it would take to overflow their city’s wastewater treatment tank?

Or, how many gigabytes their brain can hold?

These and other intriguing problems await your students in this book designed to teach children to translate statements and questions into mathematical equations. All of the problems are based on known scientific facts.

This is math. This is real. This is alive! Included is a comprehensive answer key, reproducible handouts, and hilarious illustrations. This is math the way it ought to be—tough, fun, and . . . a little weird.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #347224 in Books
• Published on: 1996-06-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 60 pages

About the Author
Asa and David are two computer geeks who are hopeless misfits and have no lives whatsoever. After doing this book, you will come to see why. Asa Kleiman has gone completely insane, but hides it relatively well. David Washington is normal in comparison, which doesn't count for much. He admits he can be extremely annoying, but he denies the frog incident entirely.

Marya Washington Tyler holds a master’s degree in gifted education from the University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point and a multidisciplinary bachelor’s degree from Michigan State University. She has four gifted children, and has taught gifted students in Michigan, Wisconsin, Idaho, Alaska, and Washington over a period of 20 years.

Near the beginning of her teaching career, when the NCTM (National Council of Teachers of Mathematics) began calling for real world mathematics in the curriculum, Marya looked for such materials, but found only feeble efforts. Her neighbors in Marshfield, Wisconsin, willingly shared with her the math puzzles they regularly face as farmers, administrators, firemen, veterinarians, archeologists, detectives, etc., and their words became her first book, Real Life Math Mysteries. Marya then tapped the humor and insight of son David, and his friend Asa, both gifted elementary students, to write It s Alive! and It s Alive and Kicking!, books which restore the warm tingle of life to even the driest mathematical computation. Within a year, Marya joined two more friends to produce Alien Math, a self-guided tour of number bases (as they are used around the galaxy).

Marya continues to lead the movement to enliven the study of mathematics with the odd, the incredible, the wild and the real. She and husband Kip collaborated on Extreme Math after intense meetings with champion mountain climbers, whitewater kayakers, hang gliders, scuba divers, bronco riders, and adventure racers. Their latest book, More Real Life Math Mysteries, presents photos and as-real-as-it-gets math problems, as explained by the dog mushers, elephant trainers, kayak guides, beekeepers, float plane pilots and more.

Customer Reviews

Interesting but not a whole lot to it
I bought this book to engage my daughter who is doing prealgebra. The ideas are interesting but the questions tend to deal more with division and multiplication than requiring any degree of difficulty or intrigue to resolve. The book is rather short and the problems could be finished in a couple of days if the child has any degree of interest.

Teachers: Make it into a CONTEST!
I used this book and it's sister, It's Alive and Kicking, as the basis for a 3 day contest for my sixth graders in math. Each day, I paired the students randomly. Three points were given for a correct answer and label on the first try, 2 points for a second try, and 1 point for getting the correct answer after a hint from me.The pair that received the most points, won a blue excellence ribbon which they wore for the rest of the day. The competetion was fierce. My students never worked this hard for a grade. They loved the disgusting math facts about germs, tape worms, sneezes, etc. I worked with 2 other teachers so that 13 math classes a day were involved in the contest. This means 26 ribbons a day for 3 days. There were very few duplicate students from day to day so everyone felt they still had a chance to win a ribbon. Some questions were quite easy and some very, very difficult and tricky. I can't wait to use these 2 books again next year.

A real hit!
I teach a gifted math class and my students love these challenging problems.