Originally I thought (and my classmate in B. Ed. at UBC, fellow student teacher at Churchill, now my Calculus teaching partner at Maple Leaf, Joseph Liu agreed with me) that it's a good excuse to get away from the tedious curriculum and to show a bit of interesting math problems to some students who are already infected with the disease of math-phobia, hoping it'd be a cure by sparking an interest. That's how we saw it when we ran it on our practicum. However, we had a different set of problems with the students at Maple Leaf. Most of our students have already learned everything covered in our Math 10 and 11 courses back in their public junior high school years. They're not all getting 100% because they don't tend to remember everything taught in junior high school, and language tends to be a more serious barrier to success than the content of the course itself, but that doesn't stop them from feeling that they already "know it all". Rarely do we actually come across a student who's afraid of math or honestly thinks that he/she cannot do math.
We have the opposite problem though: Students think math is too easy and therefore boring. Not only that, we have the opposite problem as other departments in the school too. While English and Science teachers in the same building struggle to cover what they need to in the 70 mins a day, we struggle to fill all the extra time we have. The average Math 10 lesson lasts less than 10 minutes before it starts feeling like a pointless and mindless review activity and starts calling for enrichment or English language training. Even then we run the risk of having two weeks at the end of the semester with nothing but review to do. On top of that, because of the large turn-over rate at an oversea school and a shortage of math teachers these couple years, almost all our Math 10 and 11 classes were taught by teachers completely new to the profession (like me when I taught it) or teachers whose specialties are in other areas. On top of that, the current curriculum has been implemented just a couple years ago. As a result, we are still lacking in quality enrichment material.
So here's our school's version of Math Fair. The structure and guidelines are exactly from the original Math Fair website (http://www.mathfair.com/), and the problems we use are from the galileo website (http://galileo.org/classroom-examples/math/math-fairs-math-problems-grades-k-12/), but we also encourage them to bring in their own problems from other sources. We let them form their own groups of two or three (some of us let them be in groups of four), and we make it into an eight- to ten-period project spread out over the course of the semester from picking the problem, understanding it (the hardest part for our kids due to the language barrier), solving the problem (to the best of their abilities), making a poster of the question (not the solution), making manipulative props for their problems, coming up with hints for when guests have difficulties solving the problem, practicing introducing the problem to guests and guiding them in the solution, and finally an in-class practice round, and a real Math Fair with 3 to 5 classes in the same two large dance/drama classrooms each block.
These are some pictures of the actual Math Fair on the final day when we invited teachers who are having their prep blocks and other classes to come and be our guests.
We have now done it four times in our school, and experience has told us that the more visitors we have, the more students are into it. We have had trouble with spacing when we have invited more classes than what can fit into the rooms, but we managed to work it out by sending them back and forth between the two rooms where we were having the fair.
