Why can’t we just teach them the rule? At what point do we stop this “exploration” and just give them the rule? When I was in school, the teacher just taught us the rule–we didn’t need to understand it. I’ve talked before about why teaching math as a bunch of rules to memorize is a …
September is off to a great start. Here are some highlights from my week: 1. This activity: I love that this task is accessible and challenging to different level learners. Students who didn’t know their multiplication facts used drawing and square tiles to help them figure out the dimensions. Higher level students were able to …
This was the first full week of school in New York City! As a result, I’ve spent a lot of time talking with teachers about routines. Veteran teachers know the importance of setting routines and new teachers quickly learn that without routines, the best planned lessons quickly fall apart. While routines for classroom management are …
I’m back. It’s been a while. I took a break this summer–from blogging, from twitter, from workshops. I did a little writing, some for my dissertation and some for academic papers. I went to Vancouver and gave a talk at a conference. I visited Puerto Rico and drank pina coladas by the pool. I spent …
These past few weeks have been a bit busy for me. So much great stuff has been going on, but I haven’t had a chance to write about any of it. This week, I forced myself to sit down and write a little bit so I don’t forget all of it. One of the things …
I think the most important thing elementary school teachers can do in math class is to build students’ fluency with rational numbers. The research shows that weak number sense and fluency underlies many difficulties students have with math (Geary, Bow-Thomas, & Yao, 1992). Just to be clear, I don’t mean having students memorize their multiplication tables …
I started the race at 7:54 am and crossed the finish line at 10:27 am. How long did it take me to run the race? This problems, often labeled as elapsed time problems, are difficult for students to solve. One reason is that students often have trouble coordinating between the two different units–hours and minutes. …
In March, I did a session for Global Math Department on drawing diagrams. If you don’t know about Global Math Department, you should check it out. They present free video conferences and webinars every Tuesday night and you can join in and participate that night or you can watch the recording later if you can’t make …
When I do workshops with parents, I often get complaints about why students don’t just memorize things. It’s often followed by, “I learned math that way and I’m fine!” I then ask them to solve a multiplication of fractions problems, say 4/5 x 2/3. Inevitably, one person will tell me to draw “butterfly wings” and …
One of the things that is particularly interesting to me right now is how we help young students develop the ability to justify why things work in math. Often, kids know the correct rule but have no idea why the rule works. When I ask them to explain why a rule works, they wind up …