2016 – Page 4

Year: 2016

Total 89 Posts

Great Classroom Action

By Dan Meyer • November 3, 2016 • 3 Comments

Tricia Poulin makes some awesome moves in her #bottleflipping lesson, including this one:

Okay, so now the kicker: will this ratio be maintained no matter the size of the bottle?

Graham Fletcher offers us video of kindergarten students interacting in a 3-Act modeling task:

It’s always great to engage the youngins’ in 3-Act Tasks. I’ve heard colleagues say, “I don’t have time to do these types of lessons.” I hope this helps show that we don’t have time to not have the time.

Wendy Menard offers her own spin on the Money Duck, one of my favorite examples of expected value in the wild:

The students designed their own “Money Animals”, complete with a price, distribution, and an expected value. This was all done on one sheet; the design, price and distribution were visible to all, while the calculations were on the back. After everyone had finished, we had our Money Animal Bonanza.

Sarah Carter hosts the Mini-Metric Olympics, a series of data collection & analysis events with names like “Left-Handed Sponge Squeeze” and “Paper Plate Discus”:

After the measurements were all taken, we calculated our error for each event. One student insisted that she would do better if we calculated percent error instead, so we did that too to check and see if she was right. In the future, I think I would add a “percent error” column to the score tracking sheet.

[Pseudocontext Saturday] Blimp

By Dan Meyer • October 29, 2016 • 20 Comments

Current Scoreboard

Team Me: 2
Team Commenters: 0

Come on, team. This is your week.

This Week’s Installment

Poll

What mathematical skill is the textbook trying to teach with this image?

[poll id=”4″]

(If you’re reading via email or RSS, you’ll need to click through to vote.)

Rules

Every Saturday, I post an image from a math textbook. It’s an image that implicitly or explicitly claims that “this is how we use math in the world!”

I post the image without its mathematical connection and offer four possibilities for that connection. One of them is the textbook’s. Three of them are decoys. You guess which connection is real.

After 24 hours, I update the post with the answer. If a plurality of the commenters picks the textbook’s connection, one point goes to Team Commenters. If a plurality picks one of my decoys, one point goes to Team Me. If you submit a mathematical question in the comments about the image that isn’t pseudocontext, collect a personal point.

(See the rationale for this exercise.)

Pseudocontext Submissions

Cathy Yenca

Dear Textbook… why not just measure Becky? #SillyMath pic.twitter.com/B4VuV5FFSK

— Cathy Yenca ï£¿ (@mathycathy) October 28, 2016

David Petro

Answer

The judges rule that this problem satisfies the first indicator of pseudocontext:

Given a context, the assigned question isn’t a question most human beings would ask about it.

The judges wager that if you lined up 100 arbitrary human-types and asked them the first question they wonder about this context, no more than two of them would ask about how long the ping pong ball is in air.

The judges get the sense that the author of the problem just needed some projectile — any projectile — for the task of calculating total time in air. The ~~tennis~~ ping pong ball [Thanks, Paul Hartzer. -dm], the number drawn on the ping pong ball, and the prize you win for catching the ping pong ball —Â those are all unrelated to the mathematical work. That’s pseudocontext.

How I’m Learning to Step into Math Problems

By Dan Meyer • October 27, 2016 • 18 Comments

The biggest inhibitor to my development as a math teacher is that I don’t teach or do math enough. That should make plenty of sense.

I’ve ramped up my teaching since fall with regular (okay, monthly) sessions at a local San Francisco high school. Opportunities to do math are bit easier to find and a bit easier to wedge into empty corners of my day than classroom teaching.

I was grateful, for example, that Jennifer Wilson built plenty of time for doing math into her workshop today at North Carolina’s state math education conference. She posed this problem (source unknown) and I experienced two insights into how I experience mathematical insights.

First, I approximate an answer. I recognize that the diameter of the circle will be larger than the side of the square. That’s because I can draw the diameter in my imagination and compare the lengths, and also because I know that chords in a circle are never longer than the diameter. I’m guessing the diameter is around 25 units, not more than 30, and not less than 21.

Second, I try to figure out what makes the thing this thing rather than some other thing. I don’t have any details about how the square was constructed. The circle could be any circle, but what makes that square that square? I need to construct it myself. I start changing the square’s location and scale in my head, asking myself, “Is this square legal? What about this square?”

Here is what I see in my head:

When the square becomes legal at the end, I hear an actual “ding” inside my brain. That’s when all the constraints make sense to me and I can start writing down variables and relationships.

That last “20 – r” was only possible because of the exercise of mentally making different illegal and legal squares.

From there, I trotted over to Desmos with a Pythagorean relationship in my hand.

Because I had approximated right and wrong answers earlier, I knew that 12.5 was too low. I realized that was the radius so I doubled it for the diameter.

I think these techniques are what Piggott and Woodham call “stepping into the problem.”

Here visualisations are used to help with understanding what the problem is about. The visualisation gives pupils the space to go deep into the situation to clarify and support their understanding before any generalisation can happen.

At least that’s the best term I can coax from the Internet. I don’t know if Polya’s work on problem solving speaks to that practice directly.

If you have another name for that process, let us know it.
If you’ve made mathematical problem solving a part of your development as a teacher, let us know how.
And if you have an interesting problem to share, let us know about that too.

I’ll leave you with this awesome little number from Brilliant. I promise you can solve it.

Featured Comments

William Carey:

If you ask a literature teacher what book they read most recently for pleasure and they don’t have an answer that’d be really worrying. But I bet it’s pretty rare. If you ask a math teacher what math problem they most recently worked through for pleasure, I bet the results are much scarier.

Lori M:

For decades, there has been a focus in ELA classes around a push that teachers who read, know how to teach (and reach) readers. Let’s start a similar movement among math educators.

Dick Fuller:

With some over simplification, real problems are not about mathematics, certainly not about arithmetic. The problem is the formulation of the problem. To suggest a problem is particular to values of parameters points toward evaluation as the critical component of its solution. It is not. Evaluation is particularization of a general formulation. A bald assertion: this is at the root of the difficulty students have with “real” problems.

Simon Gregg offers his own solution and then links to a fascinating question about perimeter.

[Pseudocontext Saturday] Mazes

By Dan Meyer • October 22, 2016 • 23 Comments

This Week’s Installment

Poll

What mathematical skill is the textbook trying to teach with this image?

[poll id=”3″]

(If you’re reading via email or RSS, you’ll need to click through to vote.)

Rules

Every Saturday, I post an image from a math textbook. It’s an image that implicitly or explicitly claims that “this is how we use math in the world!”

I post the image without its mathematical connection and offer four possibilities for that connection. One of them is the textbook’s. Three of them are decoys. You guess which connection is real.

(See the rationale for this exercise.)

Current Scoreboard

Team Me: 1
Team Commenters: 0

Answer

The judges rule this pseudocontext because, given that awesome square maze, it’s very unlikely that anyone would wonder about the side length of the maze and unlikelier still that anyone would wonder if the side length was rational or irrational. An exhaustive search for a 1,225 ft² square maze in Dallas, TX, produced no results, exacerbating the judges’ sense that the textbook is exploiting the world for the sake of math. That’s pseudocontext.

New Activity: Marcellus the Giant

By Dan Meyer • October 21, 2016 • 24 Comments

In Marcellus the Giant, the new activity from my team at Desmos, students learn what it means for one image to be a “scale” replica of another. They learn how to use scale to solve for missing dimensions in a proportional relationship. They also learn how scale relationships are represented on a graph.

There are three reasons I wanted to bring this activity to your attention today.

First

Marcellus the Giant is the kind of activity that would have taken us months to build a year ago. Our new Computation Layer technology let Eli Luberoff and me build it in a couple of weeks. We’re learning how to make better activities faster!

Second

When we offer students explicit instruction, our building code recommends: “Keep expository screens short, focused, and connected to existing student thinking.”

It’s hard for print curricula to connect to existing student thinking. Those pages may have been printed miles away from the student’s thinking and years earlier. They’re static.

In our case, we ask students to pick their own scale factor.

Then we ask them to click and drag and try to create a scale giant on intuition alone. (“Ask for informal analysis before formal analysis.”)

Then we teach students about proportional relationships by referring to the difference between their scale factor and the giant they created.

You made Marcellus 3.4 times as tall as Dan but you dragged Marcellus’s mouth to be 6 times wider than Dan’s mouth. A proportional giant would have the same multiple for both.

Our hypothesis is that students will find this instruction more educational and interesting than the kind of instruction that starts explaining without any kind of reference to what the student has done or already knows.

That’s possible in a digital environment like our Activity Builder. I don’t know how we’d do this on paper.

Third

Marcellus the Giant allows us to connect math back to the world in a way that print curricula can’t.

Typically, math textbooks offers students some glimpse of the world —Â two trains traveling towards each other, for example —Â and then asks them to represent that world mathematically. The curriculum asks students to turn that mathematical representationÂ into other mathematical representations —Â for instance a table into a graph, or a graph into an equation — but it rarely lets students turn that math back into the world.

If students change their equation, the world doesn’t then change to match. If the student changes the slope of the graph, the world doesn’t change with it. It’s really, really difficult for print curriculum to offer that kind of dynamic representation.

But we can. When students change the graph, we change their giant.

There is lots of evidence that connecting representations helps students understand the representations themselves. Everyone tries to connect the mathematical representations to each other. Desmos is trying to connect those representations back to the world.

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