Site of the Day: Math Moves U

Is your child a fan of Apolo Anton Ohno, the Olympic gold-medal winning speed skater? Or maybe Apolo Anton Ohno, Dancing With the Stars champion? Then maybe you should introduce him or her to Apolo Anton Ohno, the math teacher. He's one of several sports celebrities explaining math's worthiness on Math Moves U.

In the middle of those long homework sessions in which your struggling student wails, "Why do I need to know this? I'll never use it in real life," you can produce printouts of Ohno talking about calculating speed to win a race, or soccer star Mia Hamm on using tables to keep track of personal statistics, or basketball player Lisa Leslie on determining shooting averages, with real-life math problems to drive the lessons home.

Also contributing to the site are people from such kid-friendly walks of life as video game designer, concert tour manager and roller-coaster designer, explaining how math moves them. The aim is to get middle-school students more interested in math, but the high-interest pitch would be helpful to the math-impaired of any age.