To begin their math lesson, Glenhope Elementary second graders huddled up in a circle as their teacher Brittany Cohen held up a large pink-ish colored shoe.
The shoe was a gift from Dallas Mavericks player Dereck Lively II, who, the previous Saturday, April 6, made a special personal appearance at the students’ lemonade stand.
“So we are going to pretend that we are going to call Nike and have them design a signature shoe for Dereck Lively, and we are going to measure how small or big the shoe needs to be,” Cohen shared.
As they intently listened to her instructions, the students knew that another fun math lesson involving the Mavs was about to start because it’s the way Cohen has been teaching that subject for the past three years. Today, her room is filled with posters, Mavs memorabilia and even a tracker of the team’s wins and losses for the season.
“A few years ago, I had a student who was a really big Stephen Curry fan,” she recounts. Curry plays for the Golden State Warriors, while Cohen is a Mavs fan. “We just had a kinda basketball rivalry and I started putting up posters of the Mavs in the classroom.”
Those posters got out of control, she admits, but the student appreciated it and that gave her an idea.
“I saw the opportunity to incorporate the Mavs into math to make it memorable, interesting and engaging,” she stated. “The Mavs world is taking up more than one wall because I saw how much the students enjoyed it and how into it they got. It’s a really fun ‘shtick,’ I guess.”
Second grader Braden Brown is a fan. “It’s more fun measuring how tall they are or counting how many wins they have instead of ‘Kathy had five apples take away two,’” he said. “I normally learn a lot of stuff when it’s really fun. I do it quicker so I have time to do it again.”
Back to the shoe math lesson.
“Okay, so let’s measure his shoe,” she said as they counted 12 inches together before the ruler ended with a bit of shoe remaining. After moving the ruler and counting one, then announcing that it’s about two more inches, she asked “how many total inches is the shoe?”
“About 14!” the students responded.
“Good job!” Cohen said. “This time, we are going to measure how tall he is,” as she taped masking tape on the floor.
“If he is seven feet, one inch tall, how many inches tall is he?” she asked. “We have to multiply seven times 12 or add 12 seven times.”
“85!” the students answered.
For another lesson, Cohen assigned the students to pretend they were in charge of various Mavs players’ pre-game activities. Using their addition and subtraction skills, their task was to calculate what time they needed to arrive at the American Airlines Center, how many minutes they had for warm-ups and how long they would be in the locker rooms to be ready for a 7:40 p.m. tip off.
“When they are engaged, it’s not, ‘I need to learn this to pass a test then I can forget it,’” Cohen emphasized. “They are understanding the reasoning and the why behind it, and they are also mastering the skills.”
Lively learned about Cohen’s class this year after seeing one of her social media posts. He invited the entire class to one of their games where they had an opportunity to meet him and other players.
“Because he has made our world more awesome, we wanted to do something to pay it forward,” Cohen said, which resulted in the class organizing the lemonade stand and donating the money to a cancer center that Lively supports. Lively learned about their lemonade stand ahead of time and even made a personal appearance where he presented the shoe.
Cohen describes the whole journey as incredible.
“They are awesome students, and getting to watch them have fun while learning is all I could ask.”
She also hopes they remember that math was fun.
“My hope is that 10 or 20 years from now, they will be watching a Mavs game and say, ‘oh, I remember my second grade teacher who was a Mavs fan and we tracked their wins and losses and did math.’ I want to have a big impact on the students and hopefully I’ve done that.”
