Comments on: And Like That They Invented Mathematics

By: Pwolf

Pwolf — Fri, 14 Jan 2011 22:25:39 +0000

Long time fan, first time commenter. Stealing this for Monday’s lesson.

Thinking of adding a wrinkle: What about really small numbers? The negative exponent thing throws a lot of kids.

(@Zeno, I’m pretty sure the ambiguity you’re referring to is the entire point.)

By: martini

martini — Sat, 22 May 2010 17:25:59 +0000

Not for everyone this fad of yours.

By: maureen mason

maureen mason — Fri, 21 May 2010 17:06:04 +0000

You have hit on the critical elements that my experience tells me leads to learning that is rich, deep and generative: curiousity, open discussion, constructed experiences to extend thinking, and the application of new understanding in real contexts. The magic bullet.

I have work with this concept in building general curriculum for the “hard to engage” but always struggled with how to an inquiry based model could work in math. Student teachers that I work with would often ask, “What about in math?” and until now I have struggled with how to answer this. My answers always seem hypothetical and constructed and uninspiring against the way I have seen exploratory models works in other curricular areas. Student teachers are reluctant to subscribe to a framework that does not pass the, “ya but’ test for math. Your work has changed everything in this regard.

I loved that you were courageous enough to push against convention and give over power to the student. What a leap of faith! What a glorious pay off for you and for your students.

By: Zeno

Zeno — Thu, 20 May 2010 18:52:00 +0000

Speaking of the numbers on the slides, where did they come from? Are they real world numbers? What might they represent?

By: Storm Theunissen

Storm Theunissen — Thu, 20 May 2010 13:56:48 +0000

Hi Dan

I’m a bit of a techno-idiot so forgive me if you’ve received my email twice already (but I wasn’t sure if it sent right, as I didn’t get a carbon copy). So I thought I’d post here just in case.

I’m a TV documentary producer from the UK from a production company called Fresh One Productions working on a major educational series filming this summer.

I’d love to chat to you about it if you’ve got a few minutes? I thought you’d be perfect for it.

Hope to hear from you!

Thanks so much

Storm Theunissen

By: Maria Droujkova

Maria Droujkova — Thu, 20 May 2010 10:35:05 +0000

This activity is exciting to me, because it is a step toward “inviting students to do what you do” that I brought up in your previous post /?p=6795#comments

The next step would be to ask each student or a group of friends to come up with some other things they could abbreviate in math, and share with the group what they could do with it ;-)

By: Dan Meyer

Dan Meyer — Wed, 19 May 2010 14:33:27 +0000

Andrew: One thing on this particular blog post, though … is there a typo? I don’t see how the 5.23 x 10^15 corresponds to any number on any of your slides.

Yeah, what's that about? I think I have myself fixed now.

By: Andrew Zimmerman Jones

Andrew Zimmerman Jones — Wed, 19 May 2010 05:21:23 +0000

Brilliant, Dan! I work for an educational assessment company, creating evil math tests, and am forwarding the link to your TED talk to my coworkers tomorrow. There’s a trend toward highly interactive “performance assessments” right now, and I think this will really motivate all of us in education to think in new ways about how we teach math and assess mathematical ability. Kudos!

One thing on this particular blog post, though … is there a typo? I don’t see how the 5.23 x 10^15 corresponds to any number on any of your slides.

By: Johnny

Johnny — Sun, 16 May 2010 23:14:55 +0000

Yes, brilliant, but I’ve known this to be true from the time I was forced to learn math in the abstract. It was a complete failure on the part of the public school system I attended on many levels, needless to say, I didn’t graduate high school. I later gained a deep appreciation for math as I became more and more enthralled by theoretical physics and as I was required to learn complex math problems for the type of work I found myself doing. I gained the philosophy of “Lessons learned the hard way, are the best lessons learned”. To learn something from your own experimentation is the best way and for some people like me, the only way.
I know find myself facing the same dilemma I faced as a child and failed miserably with my own daughters, well mostly one of them. She is quite intelligent but is handicapped by attention span deficits as I was too, only this time around we have treated her for it with some good results. She is fascinated in all things science and I can see her taking her place amongst other females in my family as a scientist but her struggles learning math are threatening to kill her motivation, if it hasn’t already. I have tried to teach her or at least get her to listen to examples of how I use math in my job but her attitude is already bad to the whole idea, like you said “trying to sell a product no one wants but has to have”. Now that I have seen how you have presented it, I get a feeling that it may really help her. I cannot let my girls fall victim as I did to the public school system here, I will be looking for resources locally to attempt to teach her math in this fashion and I will be researching this methodology in more detail.
Good Job

By: Ravi

Ravi — Sun, 16 May 2010 21:51:28 +0000

From here it’s a good transition to logs and log scales. I didn’t think of this myself, but a log scale is a way to view numbers strictly in terms of their relative magnitude. So your “times 10 to the x” concession to hugeness has applications later on as well.