Flatland will help stimulate ideas of how to better get along with those they feel different from and uncomfortable around.
I am really excited to use this book, along with other resources to help with learning activities that correspond to the book's topics, to increase my students' awareness of multiculturalism and provide a platform that presents mathematics in a new and life-application-level way. This project will be used in all my math classes that I end up teaching, especially in my Geometry classes, and will also be used in my profession portfolio for teaching position interviews. I believe it is a very valuable resource. I will use the book Flatland along with other Multicultural and ESL resources to cover the dimensions of Multicultural Education:.
Content Integration: Content integration deals with the extent to which teachers use examples and content from a variety of cultures and groups to illustrate key concepts, principles, generalizations, and theories in their subject area or discipline. The book Flatland was written in the time and place of Victorian England. It teaches students that all cultures are not alike - that people have different ideas and thought processes depending on where they live. For example, the main character, a square from Flatland, has many social viewpoints that are extremely different from those of other societies. These views are dealt with at the beginning of the novel, and the square comes to examine these views and lead the reader to examine their own. The Flatland society consists of regular shapes - lines, triangles, squares, heptagons, hexagons, all the way to circles. To Flatlanders, the more circular you are, the more perfect you are. The classes are defined as follows: women are lines, isosceles triangles are servants and slaves, regular triangles are lower working class, squares are gentlemen, heptagons and above are nobility, circles are priests.
