Dan Meyer

Total 1628 Posts

I'm Dan and this is my blog. I'm a former high school math teacher and current head of teaching at Desmos. He / him. More here.

In Design I Trust

By Dan Meyer • September 10, 2008 • 16 Comments

[BTW: Updated the supporting graphics for clarity.]

In trying to teach really difficult material – so, math, or any math-based science, I guess – the look of the material rivals the material itself for importance.

The weird thing I realized while breaking several traffic laws on the way to work this morning is that there are no large design decisions. Even when the look of the thing changes drastically – from one field to its inverse, for example – the decision was small, the action simple.

Which Is Clearer?

Why It Matters

This makes graphic design a defining aspect of my teaching philosophy, something indicative of the larger whole. My enthusiasm for design points at my belief that small decisions lead to exponential gains, that the sum of my small color, opacity, and alignment choices will lead to a huge net win for my kids, that the math will be exponentially clearer, that we’ll unwaste huge stores of time.

Video Is King

Therefore, if I had unlimited time and capital to create a curriculum, I’d use video, because with video, you make those incremental decisions thirty times every second. If those decisions are made carelessly, of course, the result will be utterly disastrous, turgid, limp, and boring –Â a medium unearned – as I’m sure you’ve witnessed. The inverse is also true, though, and that awareness is now taking me down some interesting paths.

The First Fortnight

By Dan Meyer • September 8, 2008 • 19 Comments

w/r/t my assertion that many students want to know right away if you like them or hate them, that they want to know so fast they’re willing to provoke a response:

I got one the first day. A kid came in clowning hard, looking to assert real fast what he was about, looking to find out what I was about. He was obviously in the business of rattling teachers.

I’m not saying I know how this is going to end but I know how I wasn’t going to let it begin. Out of twenty-four students in class, his was the only name I knew. Yet when I was running down the roster taking attendance, I asked his name just like any other. I wasn’t going to give him any celebrity. I wasn’t going to let him know his circus-act even registered.

This trained obliviousness doubles as a legitimate instructional strategy. Running through some whiteboard exercises with my students, students tossed answers out impulsively – looking to keep the effort-gratification cycle spinning quickly. Their answers were often correct, but I felt them reading me, gauging my eyes and mouth for some indication they had scored.

If I hesitated even a moment, they’d reverse themselves or default to their next, on-deck guess. At that point I’d issue a look, one which I’ll issue maybe a hundred million billion times over the course of this school year. It reads like this:

At that point their second-guessing begins in earnest. Problems are re-worked and arguments erupt only to find when the dust settles and the rubble clears that their first answers were correct.

At the end of this first fortnight, I’m realizing how well this affectation works with students, how at the end of the school year they’ll take five or six more seconds on a problem –Â an eternity by the standards of a 14-yo – reworking even the easy ones, and then when I issue that look, they’ll tell me to cram it, insisting on their first answer because they earned it.

I’m also realizing with this new group of students exactly how tight last year’s class and I became, and something else which is nice to realize and never a guarantee: that the time we spent together wasn’t meaningless.

The Days You Wish You Had A Real Job

By Dan Meyer • September 5, 2008 • 36 Comments

… a teacher’s true effectiveness should not be linked to a teacher’s right to renew his or her license.

–the Washington Teachers’ Union, a letter to its members. [The Quick And The Ed]

I’m uninterested in resurrecting last month’s Million Comment March, or discussing She Who Must Not Be Named, or her policies, or their motivations, or their financiers (but if you absolutely must) I’m just curious what in the history of organized labor has led teachers’ unions to formally announce what amounts to a collective and colossal dereliction of duty.

Here Comes Everything

By Dan Meyer • September 2, 2008 • 51 Comments

Among other guiding principles for this Internet timesuck I call dy/dan, this has been the enduring hope: that if I’m as transparent as possible, as honest as possible, and if I upload as many supplemental materials as possible, then you and I can turn losses into wins.

So yesterday I posted my entire Geometry curriculum online: geometry.mrmeyer.com.

The whole year. 1.94 gigabytes. Every lesson plan. Every handout. 2,144 slides – flavored in Keynote, PowerPoint, and PDF.

I hope you can use this or, at least, that you know someone who can use this, in which case, please pass it along.

Dear Edupornographers:

By Dan Meyer • August 31, 2008 • 30 Comments

Bored. I’m so bored of these.

[BTW: …and by “bored” I mean “infuriated“.]

[BTW: excellent remarks from Sylvia Martinez on another example of child exploitation by educators: “It’s easy to believe in them, because they validate what we believe about ourselves.”]

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