This is a great Act 1, in Dan Meyer terminology, for introducing exponential functions.
It's 40ish seconds long & totally accessible for ES, MS, & HS students.
For many students, no matter their age, math begins with an answer. You then form a question, jeopardy style, to help disguise the number.
Most students learn to expect math questions and problems to be short, quick, to the point, solvable and structured around "clean" answers (often related in some way to integer components). They anticipate the answers before they anticipate the questions. I am not sure if they even consider the math.
They completely miss the point and the empowering strength of math process and pattern.
I quickly figured out how to play that game successfully – success in that case being measured by my being able to solve under exam conditions, problems like the ones the teacher had shown us and we had practiced in class and done for homework.
In fact, you can’t separate real teaching from learning. They are simply two perspectives of the same human interactive process.
For whereas technology can provide instruction and can provide teachers and students with resources to assist them, what is cannot do on its own is teach them.
In 1990, after seven years of teaching at Harvard, Eric Mazur, now Balkanski professor of physics and applied physics, was delivering clear, polished lectures and demonstrations and getting high student evaluations for his introductory Physics 11 course, populated mainly by premed and engineering students who were successfully solving complicated problems. Then he discovered that his success as a teacher "was a complete illusion, a house of cards." THIS IS A MUST READ ARTICLE!
If you'd like to see assessment amount to more than a meaningless exercise in classroom control, if you'd like to see cheating drop and confidence rise, if you'd like to see a higher correlation between the grade you feel a student deserves and the grade on that student's transcript …
… take something from this page.
Chris, I definitely think this process for assessment could be utilized in other disciplines quite easily. The idea of student ownership is a huge factor for motivating students. The parent involvement seems to be a positive aspect, too. Thank you so much for keeping us all aware of innovative practices happening in education.
Karen Anderson
the fact that there are millions of people who, rather than examine the evidence and change their position, prefer to cling to what they were taught as children, is simply a fact of life
Americans seem particularly prone to this head-in-the-sands behavior.
Sure, it takes time to build those networks. But there is an audience out there of committed teachers who are eager for all the help they can get.
I agree Jere. I think it is a great segway into PBL. Lots of good PBL could be generated by just looking at this site and starting to ask some interesting questions. Why?
Bob
Educators sometimes say that they shy from assessing creative thought for fear of inhibiting students, but this is a grave error in my view,
I once saw a class at Portland HS in Maine where the student oral presentations were unbelievably good, across the board, with “average” kids. How did you do it, I asked the teacher?