I met Dan Meyer today

Dan started our workshop/discussion with three considerations:
1) Albert Einstein said that the formulation of the problem is more important than the solution
2) Daniel Willingham who wrote “Why Don’t Students Like School?” said that teachers rush to give the answer but forget to develop the question
3) What’s the point of a Maths class? Students do not share our enthusiasm for the curriculum. They learn to puzzle and unpuzzle themselves. He claimed the ideal student creates their own question and then has the motivation to answer it themselves, without the teacher.
We then modelled developing a coordinate system by discussing a list of fruit- kiwi, apple, papaya, tomato, pineapple, strawberry, banana and pomegranate as we worked in groups to position them on vertical axes of tasty to untasty in conjunction with horizontal axes of hard to easy. There was an interesting discussion on the definition of easy, with regard to fruit. Further discussion ensued as to the exact positioning within each quadrant, of the pieces of fruit. Following this we broke into groups and chose an object to rate and the categories on the axes.

This provided all sorts of ranking systems. The challenge remaining for my group is to come up with a topic relating to the current investigation of perspectives- our way of relating trigonometry to the sporting field and the positioning of projectors to create the images on the field.

It was an exciting start to an informative session, which I will continue in the next post.