"Math Corps: Basic Training Day" is a fantasy seeking to inspire readership to make it reality. The driving thesis of MC: BTD is startling. First it says: don't teach math, teach how to have fun playing math courses. Secondly, have successful math course players do the teaching. More startling is that it takes only one day of training to start a player, from middle school to early college, on the road to the fun of math course mastery. Sounds great, but how can a math course be "played" without messing with the course? The answer is surprisingly simple and obvious. Math courses are a series of certified point scoring events called exams-that makes any math course, as is, no messing needed, a challenging sport. Clearly, this fantasy cannot happen without terrible math students making it happen. So, if terrible math students are the best teachers of terrible math students, how do we get the first group of terrible students interested and fully trained, without the help of enthusiastic successful terrible students to make that happen? This is the fantasy's barrier conundrum. To cross this barrier, the author plays himself in his own fantasy as Dr. L. who starts a college campus outpost of the Math Corps that offers a day of special training to new inductees. The Math Corps takes on the mission of recruiting and training terrible math students to destroy Math Dragons that drag down the prospects of math students and limit them from being all they can be. To join the Corps, and fight the Corps' fight, its cadets must go through one day of basic training where they are trained in methods to destroy math course dragons with teamwork fun and fighting spirit. That day of basic training is "Math Corps: Basic Training Day." The first principle of the Math Corps is that terrible math students make the best math teachers. In keeping with the spirit of this principle, the Math Corps' Basic Training Day experience is presented to the reader, not by Dr. L., but through the words of his most troublesome inductee "Charlie." Through "Charlie's Narrative" the reader learns how Dr. L. and Charlie's assigned one-on-one tutor-trainer handle every question, uncertainty, annoyance, impatience, boredom, bewilderment, and concern felt by Charlie and fellow inductees on their day of basic training. The hope and expectation is that Charlie's fantasy Basic Training Day experience spawns real Basic Training Days that inspire terrible math students into fantastic math course winners. Charlie's narrative's emphasis on student issues assimilating the methodologies of gaming math courses focuses the reader on what and who is important on Basic Training Day: the training working well for the trainees. However, the reader may skip "Charlie's Narrative" and study the book's appendices which deliver all Basic Training Day principles and methodologies in a fast-paced concise didactic format. The author, Dr. Lanzaro, a physicist by training, had to solve key technical issues that prevent math courses from being as much fun to play as a popular sport. For example, a sport, to be fun, needs a visual playing field to play upon. Players need visuals to see in the forward direction, which requires seeing where they are versus where they need to be. Training must provide nearly instantaneous feedback and correction. Spectators need a way of cheering performance, without knowing the math involved. Competition needs visual representation to magnify the significance of winning. Visual representation of exam preparedness opens doors to interfacing with video games and virtual realities that can make accomplishing training goals game-like fun. MC: BTD trains math hating terrible students in the tools of math course "sportification" as well as the training methodologies to become its sport heroes. This book is for educators of all kinds seeking something new, to create new days, to be new in. Contact author: dr_l@modemics.com
Born in Brooklyn, New York, a week after Pearl Harbor, a time when childhood fun had to be magically invented every day, the author's penchant for problem solving was also born. As a victim of Polio in the early 50's his problem solving inventiveness was severely tested by the necessity of having to re-invent himself. His childhood attraction to board games, puzzles, and unsolved problems powered him in academic pursuits, eventually leading to a PhD in physics granted by the University of California at Berkeley. Dr. Lanzaro has enjoyed a wide ranging career ranging from applied physics to pure business; ultimately retiring as an instructor of physics and math at the college level. The author's "Math Corps: Basic Training Day" is a book of the many inventions required to solve one basic major problem: make math courses so much fun that they eventually become the child's play we need them to be.
