My views on the content-area book clubs are mixed because I am not sure how I feel about them. Throughout my experience with the book club with The Miscalculations of Lightning Girl, I felt that the book choice was somewhat math but the book itself was not super math related. I feel that book clubs are a good idea, but this just was not the best book for a book club.
If I were to use to use this book in a math class, I would not use this book as a whole. I would instead just select excerpts from throughout the book and use those to teach from as examples or reading materials. I believe that the excerpts would be more beneficial and meaningful in a class rather than having the whole class read the book because there are too many extraneous non-math related topics in the book.
The types of excerpts that I would like to use from the book is various excerpts about different math concepts such as pi, the Fibonacci Pattern, and other concepts. There are other excerpts that did not directly relate to math, but instead related to school in general and deal with issues such as bullying, grouping of students, and cheating. These would be good excerpts because they could start meaningful conversations that allowed the students to understand the effects of bullying on the victim, why teachers group students the way they do, and why cheating is so bad. This conversation can help to create a safe environment for all students to feel safe and welcome in the class and be willing to learn.
Overall, I do not think I would use book clubs in a math class with this book, but I do believe that book clubs in general are a great idea for any content-area class. In order for the book clubs to be successful the books that are read by the students need to be interesting to them and also be related to the content area. Between math and science, I think that science leans itself to book clubs more that math just from the nature of the class, the availability of books with reference to science concepts, and the diverse topics discussed in the class, but book clubs can be done in any content-area class.
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Maegan
Thank you for sharing! As I read through your post, I was able to make many connections between both of our thoughts about book clubs. First, I would not use book clubs in a math class. I believe it would be too difficult to find the right book to get a whole class engaged with the text. I also would only use excepts from a book rather than reading the whole thing if the class allowed. This would lead to great discussion points about the text but nothing more. It is cool to see that not everyone would use book clubs in their classrooms, but that we all are intrigued by what they could bring to the table.
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