It was that time of year again, school was starting and all the kids were eager to try out for their favorite sport teams. The most popular sport at this P.E.I school was soccer. This year tryouts were long and tough, but the most skilled stuck through. One outstanding boy was the junior high jock named Danny. He had been playing soccer almost his whole life and had a great love for it. He was always the one who got the girls and succeeded in soccer and most team sports. The season started off strong with many wins and fun times. As the school year went on, Danny started to fall behind in his classes. Some he was getting extra help with but the one that he had the most trouble with was his math class. His teacher, parents and coach warned him that if he didn’t get more than 75% on his next test he would have to resign from him being the captain of the team. He didn’t know what he was going to do and he needed to find some help. He didn’t stay very focussed with this goal so he just pushed it aside and said he would study the night before. His teammates noticed that he was losing hope in doing good on this test so they had a meeting one afternoon to see if they could think of something to help him. They came up with a great plan and decided to see if it would work for it was the last resort. The next day as they all showed up for practice Danny was in for a little surprise. They told him he was in for a math review and they handed him their play-by-play chalkboard. First they told him he was to find the area of the soccer field. They had set up soccer balls to match the dimensions of the field along two of the four sidelines and asked him to figure it out. He accomplished that one, but that one was just a warm up. Next, they divided up the team and used the centerline of the field as the divider in a fraction and made two separate fractions to form an equation and told him to divide them. He looked at his friends and proceeded to copy out the problem on the chalkboard. Once again he did well. Then they told him to shift to his attention to one of the soccer nets and picture the net being a square root sign and the kids standing under the net to be the number that you are working with. He was puzzled for a minute and thought to himself about this one. He worked it out on the board and even took a calculator out of his school bag and figured it out. He was starting to enjoy this and get the hang of it. He found that having props of what he was used to seeing and being around helped him focus better and to learn the steps to working out some problems. That night he went home and studied different problems in his notebook and referred back to the teacher’s helpful notes and the even called one of his buddies for some help with doing radicals because they just started those and he wasn’t quite sure how to divide them. His friend told him to take the jelly beans he was eating and to set them up on his paper into radical signs and figure it out from there.
A few days after writing his test the teacher started to hand them back. He was nervous to see the number at the top of the page but as the teacher reached over and handed it to him with a "Good Job Danny," he knew he did well. At the top of his page shined an 83% and he knew he owed it all to his good old teammates!