C4T #1 - Dan Meyer

The first teacher's blog I was assigned to follow was that of Mr. Dan Meyer. He was a high school math teacher who now spends his time advocating for better math instruction. He is currently studying math education at Stanford University. The two blog posts that I first read were very insightful and challenged how educators view math instruction.

His first post Answer Getting and Resource Finding, elaborated on some of his most recent tweets comparing math students to math teachers.

Math students : Answer-getting :: Math teachers :: Resource-finding

Math students : "What's the formula for ____?" :: Math teachers : "Who's got a good lesson for ____?"

Math students : Understanding math :: Math teachers : Understanding what makes a lesson good

This is a scary comparison. Are teachers becoming like the students they complain about? Some students just want you to give them the answer or give them a shortcut to finding the answer. They just want you to tell them the formula, so they can memorize it for the test. In this way, they are not truly understanding the math they are being taught. Rather than thinking about what makes a lesson good and then expanding on that to create a meaningful lesson, are teachers just asking for shortcuts, like the students who just want to be handed information? This sparked an interesting discussion in the comments section. My contribution included what I think makes a good lesson good. I believe that a good lesson plan engages students and results in a greater understanding of the content on their behalf. How do you gauge understanding? That goes back to asking good questions -- even good test questions. I also elaborated on a good math teacher that I had in high school. This was the first class in which I felt that I had completed the "math puzzle." In this class, we were given formulas, shown why they are true, and then given problems in which we had to figure out which formula (or combination of several) was needed. I learned by doing. I put the puzzle together all on my own. And I still feel a sense of accomplishment from that class. 

Mr. Meyer's next post was a summary of a fun activity that he did with students in a summer workshop. In The Money Animal Marketplace, students were challenged to create a business model in groups. Each group was selling a different animal-shaped bar of soap with varying amounts of money hidden inside. Each group could choose their own animal, distribution of cash, and price. They then created a poster to market their product and placed it at the front of the classroom. Next, each student was able to review the posters and purchase three bars of soap (three different or three of the same, but not their own). They were only given a few minutes to decide. Then the results were graphed and discussed in class. Groups found their company's profits, they factored losses, and more. Mr. Meyer writes that in this lesson he is in essence extending a question. He flips it around and has the students create their own questions. I loved the creativity of this activity. It seems like the students really enjoyed creating their business models and they used trial and error to find the most profit, so they were learning by actually using the tools given by the teacher.