Dan Meyer: Math class needs a makeover | Video on TED.com:
So here it is, a high school math teacher demonstrating how to engage students in creating the problems. This was just what I complained wasn't happening in my math classes in high school. Math was a torture of memorizing formula and anticipating which formula I would need to pass a test.
Now what you all need to know is that I am NOT a math teacher. Truth be told, I never really understood much after Algebra. What I am good at is figuring out what the text is asking for and I did exactly as this teacher suggested and decoded the text book to pass my classes. Thing is, I knew even in high school that I couldn't actually use math to really solve problems, because I was never actually asked to formulate a problem in school.
As a teacher candidate, I was challenged to teach math and it was the one thing I didn't get great evaluations on during my student teaching. I still didn't really understand fractions and using the curriculum I fell back on my old strategy of decoding.
As a teacher in an American Indian Tribal school my challenge was to present students with a relevant problem and to try to reason out a way to solve it. In this video, Dan Meyer uses a problem involving water and a container. In my case, I wanted to do a beading project and the question was how many beads of each color would I need to cover a particular area that had a defined pattern. This was a real math problem. As it turned out, it was solved using statistics since the beads themselves were not uniform in size, so I just had to be in the ball park.
My American Indian students really got into this problem - each one had their own design, so all the problems would have different answers - but the students were generous and we did my problem first. The project went on to involve how much the cost would be for the materials. Whether the cost could be recouped with a profit if the piece was sold, or alternately how many powwow prizes would they have to earn before the piece paid for itself. This resulted in a real decision about going forward with the project or modifying it. I modified my beading project to be much more manageable, not based on the cost in money, but rather the cost in time. Oh and I should say, this was a fourth grade project done in 9 weeks in the fall so they would have the winter to complete the piece in time for the spring and summer powwow season.
What I really learned form this video is to take the books and strip down the problem so that students have to talk about it in the same way as we did during our beading projects. This makes educated guessing safe and useful and provides everyone with the confidence that eventually we will arrive at an answer. Now all I need is a little more expertise with video and sound.
