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Month: October 2014

Total 9 Posts

These Horrible Coin Problems (And What We Can Do About Them)

By • October 15, 2014 • 32 Comments

From Pearson’s Common Core Algebra 2 text (and everyone else’s Algebra 2 text for that matter):

Mark has 42 coins consisting of dimes and quarters. The total value of his coins is $6. How many of each type of coin does he have? Show all your work and explain what method you used to solve the problem.

The only math students who like these problems are the ones who grow up to be math teachers.

One fix here is to locate a context that is more relevant to students than this contrivance about coins, which is a flimsy hangar for the skill of “solving systems of equations” if I ever saw one. The other fix recognizes that the work is fake also, that “solving a system of equations” is dull, formal, and procedural where “setting up a system of equations” is more interesting, informal, and relational.

Here is that fix. Show this brief clip:

Ask students to write down their best estimates of a) what kinds of coins there are, b) how many total coins there are, c) what the coins are worth.

The work in the original problem is pitched at such a formal level you’ll have students raising their hands around the room asking you how to start. In our revision, which of your students will struggle to participate?

Now tell them the coins are worth $62.00. Find out who guessed closest. Now ask them to find out what could be the answer – a number of quarters and pennies that adds up to $62.00. Write all the possibilities on the board. Do we all have the same pair? No? Then we need to know more information.

Now tell them there are 1,400 coins. Find out who guessed closest. Ask them if they think there are more quarters or pennies and how they know. Ask them now to find out what could be the answer – the coins still have to add up to $62.00 and now we know there are 1,400 of them.

This will be more challenging, but the challenge will motivate your instruction. As students guess and check and guess and check, they may experience the “need for computation“. So step in then and help them develop their ability to compute the solution of a system of equations. And once students locate an answer (200 quarters and 1200 pennies) don’t be quick to confirm it’s the only possible answer. Play coy. Sow doubt. Start a fight. “Find another possibility,” you can free to tell your fast finishers, knowing full well they’ve found the only possibility. “Okay, fine,” you can say when they call you on your ruse. “Prove that’s the only possible solution. How do you know?”

Again, I’m asking us to look at the work and not just the world. When students are bored with these coin problems, the answer isn’t to change the story from coins to mobile phones. The answer isn’t just that, anyway. The answer is to look first at what students are doing with the coins – just solving a system of equations – and add more interesting work – estimating, arguing about, and formulating a system of equations first, and then solving it.

This is a series about “developing the question” in math class.

Featured Tweets

I asked for help making the original problem better on Twitter. Here is a selection of helpful responses:

2014 Oct 20. Michael Gier used this approach in class.

Featured Comments

Isaac D:

One of the challenges for the teacher is to guide the discussion back to the more interesting and important questions. Why does this technique (constructing systems of equations) work? Where else could we use similar strategies? Are there other ways to construct these equations that might be more useful in certain contexts?

Teach Students Correct But Useless Steps

By • October 10, 2014 • 37 Comments

Christopher Danielson and Megan Schmidt have both written recently and compellingly about the trouble students have when taught that math is a series of correct “steps.”

Danielson, doing his best Howard Beale:

THE STEPS WIN, PEOPLE! The steps trump thinking. The steps trump number sense. The steps triumph over all.

Let me add to the conversation the category of “steps that are correct but useless.” These are great. They come from a conversation I had, like, fifteen minutes ago with a teacher named Leah Temes here at NWMC 2014.

Leah teaches Algebra II. We were talking about solving systems of equations. It’s really easy to teach the solution to a system like this as a series of correct, useful steps:

2x + 3y = 10
5x – 3y = 4

  1. Add the second equation to the first one.
  2. Solve for x.
  3. Substitute x in either equation to solve for y.
  4. Check that pair in the other equation for full credit.

Leah said she was tired of seeing her students mimic those correct steps without understanding why they worked. So instead of showing her students steps that were useful and correct, she asked them if she was allowed to add the following two equations:

2x + 3y = 10
5 = 5

To get:

2x + 3y + 5 = 10 + 5

Is everything still correct? Yes.

Was that useful? No.

This experience awakened her students to a category of steps in addition to the correct and useful ones they’re supposed to memorize and the incorrect and useless ones they’re supposed to avoid – correct and useless steps.

Alerting your students to that category of steps may make math seem less intimidating and more interesting. Math isn’t any longer a matter of staying on the right side of a line between the incorrect and correct steps. There’s another region out there, one that’s a bit less tame, a place for explorers, a place where the worst thing that can happen is you did something right but it just wasn’t useful. That category of steps also requires justification – “how do you know this is correct?” – which can help bend the student away from memorization and back towards understanding.

BTW. All of this implies a fourth category of steps – incorrect but useful. Can anybody give an example?

Featured Comments

Cathy Yenca:

I do a similar thing when solving equations in one variable by asking students if I can add 1,000,000, let’s say, to each side of an equation… or if I can subtract 27 from both sides… or divide both sides by 200… etc. etc. We talk about what is “legal” (have we followed the rules of algebra and the concept of “balance” and equivalence?) and what is “helpful” (have we done something “legal” that helps us isolate the variable so we can solve this thing?”) Exaggerated examples like adding 1,000,000 to both sides seem to make an impression on kids.

David Petro:

I have long been a fan of deliberately sabotaging a solution to something that I might be doing on the board so that somewhere down the road things become obviously wrong. This is so students can start to develop strategies for what to do when this happens.

Many will tell you that it’s important for students to make mistakes (in fact, that they learn the most when they do). But that sometimes runs counter to what they see in class. That is, a teacher demonstrating flawless execution of mathematics. Even some of our best students often won’t even attempt a problem unless they are sure they will get it correct. If they are ever going to become comfortable with making mistakes as part of the normal process then we have to include managing those mistakes as part of our day to day in class.

Moana Evans:

[It’s] incorrect but useful to estimate things like area problems, in order to find out a ballpark figure and check if you’ve done the math right.

Same & Different As It Ever Was

By • October 6, 2014 • 15 Comments

Same

In the September 2014 edition of Mathematics Teacher, reader Thomas Bannon reports that his research group has found that the applications of algebra haven’t changed much throughout history.

310:

Demochares has lived a fourth of his life as a boy; a fifth as a youth; a third as a man; and has spent 13 years in his dotage; how old is he?

1896:

A man bought a horse and carriage for $500, paying three times as much for the carriage as for the horse. How much did each cost?

1910:

The Panama Canal will be 46 miles long. Of this distance the lower land parts on the Atlantic and Pacific sides will together be 9 times the length of the Culebra Cut, or hill part. How many miles long will the Culebra Cut be? Prove answer.

2013:

Shandra’s age is four more than three times Sherita’s age. Write an equation for Shandra’s age. Solve if Sherita is 3 years old.

I’m grateful for Bannon’s research but his conclusion is, in my opinion, overly sunny:

Looking through these century-old mathematics book can be a lot of fun. Challenging students to find and solve what they consider the most interesting problem can be a great contest or project.

My alternate reading here is that the primary application of school algebra throughout history has been to solve contrived questions. Instead of challenging students to answer the most interesting of those contrived questions, we should ask questions that aren’t contrived and that actually do justice to the power of algebra. Or skip the whole algebra thing altogether.

Different

If you told me there existed a book of arithmetic problems that didn’t include any numbers, I’d wonder which progressive post-CCSS author wrote it. Imagine my surprise to find Problems Without Figures, a book of 360 such problems, published in 1909.

For example, imagine the interesting possible responses to #39:

What would be a convenient way to find the combined weight of what you eat and drink at a meal?

That’s great question development. Now here’s an alternative where we rush students along to the answer:

Sam weighs 185.3 pounds after lunch. He weighed 184.2 before lunch. What was the weight of his lunch?

So much less interesting! As the author explains in the powerful foreword:

Adding, subtracting, multiplying and dividing do not train the power to reason, but deciding in a given set of conditions which of these operations to use and why, is the feature of arithmetic which requires reasoning.

Add the numbers back into the problem later. Two minutes later, I don’t care. But subtracting them for just two minutes allows for that many more interesting answers to that many more interesting questions.

[via @lucyefreitas]

This is a series about “developing the question” in math class.

September Remainders

By • October 1, 2014 • 3 Comments

Awesome Internetting from the last month.

New Blog Subscriptions

  • Tracy Zager has been one of my favorite math voices on Twitter this school year and she’s now blogging. She’s also recently announced a fight with breast cancer and has requested that we “Please help me remember that I have thinking and ideas to share, and am involved in a world bigger than this right now.”
  • Annie Fetter’s work at the Math Forum has always been impressive and it’s a total oversight I hadn’t realized she writes a blog until now.
  • Tim McCaffrey and I share a lot of the same enthusiasms. He helps districts run lesson studies around three-act tasks and just started blogging about it.
  • Matt Bury had positively invaluable commentary during last month’s adaptive learning discussions.
  • Dan Burf, a/k/a Quadrant Dan, is a new teacher who has been using my old, old lessons, which is kind of fun to watch.
  • Amy Roediger, whose writing on Classkick was extremely useful.
  • Julie Wright is full of promise.
  • Just Mathness is full of promise.

New Twitter Follows

Multimedia Math

I make an open offer to my workshop participants to help them with their video editing. A couple of newcomers to multimedia modeling came up with these two tasks:

Great Tweets

Max Goldstein:

Proofs are social documents not compiled code.

Press Clippings

  • The Ontario Ministry of Education filmed an interview series with me and other math education-types in Toronto.
  • An interview with a teen writer from The Santa Fe New Mexican.
  • An interview with AFEMO, a Francophone group of math educators.
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