For the record, I added the “wow!”

I’m still struggling with this, but can’t come up with a coherent comment. I’ll keep struggling.

“Everything is said by an observer.” -Humberto Maturana

What is interesting? What is practical? What is real(-world)? I can read most all of the comments on this page without considering Maturana’s statement and be equally puzzled by the dilemma captured by @Curmudgeon, “Insisting that ALL problems be interesting is a short journey to madness.”

But Maturana reminds us that we must first get beyond our own eyes when defining interesting. Of course, what is interesting to us is not universally interesting. And further, their probably is no “universally interesting.” (I make this claim on empirical evidence from my classroom, dead certain I had found the perfect problem to pose to my students.)

Maturana reminds me that we must see the world through the eyes of each one of our students to consider what might be interesting, what puzzle might create a desire (need) for the student to solve it. So, the power in a WCYDWT sort of approach, to me, is that the student’s identify the puzzle/problem they wish to pursue. The teacher corrals this energy and sneaks in the “mathematics” that must be “covered.”

And finally, applying Maturana’s comment to mathematics, and maybe “high school mathematics” as @Karl describes it. I would say it is worth noting the difference between “high school mathematics” and the “mathematics of a high school student.”

The mathematical ways of knowing of a teenager is different from our own. To say, “These kids are just beginning and are learning the moves” seems to assume we know them. Who is to say we to are’t just beginning to learn the moves.

Trying to bring this esoteric approach to my comment toward something tangible, I suggest teaching mathematics in such a way that we pay attention to what we know, as “keepers” of the discipline, but we strive to make our HS math courses about the “mathematics of our high school students.” Our two primary roles would be to encourage the emergence of this sort of mathematics, and then to listen well, and work to connect it to the ways we know mathematics, what we consider to be the Discipline, that is “high school mathematics.”

Psuedocontext: agreed @Raj, brilliantly concise deconstruction of this lazy approach to curriculum publishing.

@Dan: a problem, naming psuedocontext and tearing it down makes us want to ask then, what then is real context? We seem stuck to defining “real context” in the moment/context of the learning environment. And as such, can curriculum only be created after it has been experienced? Which at best then we are stuck with a prefabbed sequence of psuedocontextual problems, psuedocontextual for any student thereafter?

Being a former math teacher and a math enthusiast, I am forced to apologize for my profession thus:

Her: Why are the problems so stupid?
Me: I don’t know. I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry!