I was at an entertaining presentation last spring in Duluth, MN during the MCTM conference. Dan Meyer spoke of math blogs, twitter feeds, electronic resources and finally perplexity. Since then I am continually impressed by the math teacher community that has formed online.
This blog is a result.
MCTM was fantastic, but the great mysteries of the internet were not the only things I took away from Mr. Meyer's keynote presentation in Duluth. He described an atmosphere of questioning, one that I found lacking in my classroom. I finally realized that in my class I ask too many questions.
My whole teaching career has been about getting to the right questions which is exactly what I should be doing...but it isn't me that should be doing the asking, it should be the students. In my experience teaching was about questioning the students, "never give an answer" was the old adage. I never stopped asking questions and so I took the perplexity out of math and let students only experience the work/outcomes. When all along what I truly love about math and teaching is coming up with the questions. If I like it, maybe students will too.
So I tried it. I wanted to stop asking the questions. I am teaching a summer math course to students who want to leapfrog ALG II and I presented this story. Abbreviated version:
Farmer saves kings life. King says farmer can have anything in kingdom. Farmer wants one grain of rice on the first square of a chess board, then 2 grains on the second square, 4 grains on the third etc...
Now I have taught exponential growth multiple times using different stories like this, sometimes its money other times its grains of sand. What was different about this time is that I didn't ask any questions at the end. I just had the story up on the screen and waited. After a few minutes I wrote the heading "questions" on the white board and asked if anybody had any.
Students stared at my blankly and thought to themselves, that's a fun story, can we please move on... (side note this is a group of accelerated students, who are great, but have also taken 3 hours everyday out of their summer to do math, by mid July they (and me) are ready to cut any and all BS and get out of class as soon as possible).
I dragged some questions out of them and it went relatively well, I had a few things in my back pocket and we had some conversations that I would have never thought come up. We used skills (algebra II skills) that I did not think would apply (unit conversion, volume formulas) we even fired up excel to do a quick sum. I realized this this type of teaching is hard. You have to be a true mathematician at the board but also an emcee to document and narrate events as well as a facilitator to keep conversation flowing but not over flowing.
No doubt that this transformation is going to be hard but also necessary. If I am just coming to grips with the idea that I ask to many questions then I have a feeling students are coming to me from a long line of questioning teachers who thought they were provoking thought when they really were feeding unquestioning brains.
So today I embark the journey to change my classroom. To stop asking all the questions. To allow (at times) students to drive the lesson/conversation.
Challenges ahead, better thinkers to follow.
