Rethinking Education #3

​DAN MEYER - TED TALK

Especially in math, teachers find themselves trying to “sell a product to a market that doesn’t want it but is forced by law to buy it.” Dan Meyer comes up with advertisements that makes our product more desirable. When you see students having a lack of initiative, perseverance, or retention, are discouraged by word problems, or are eager to know what formula to use, then you know that you are approaching math reasoning all wrong. Mr. Meyer makes a good point that textbooks like to lay everything out for the students and fail in producing the “need” for them to find interest in the problem or even need to use critical thinking in order to solve the problem. Instead, they give you every piece of information that you need and encourage you to use the formula they provide. Students are able to pass the class simply by knowing how to decode a textbook and plugging things into a formula without having to actually learn any math. The reasoning behind the math and the methods we use to get to the answer normally holds more value than the answer itself. That way, when you find yourself with a similar problem, you understand the methods and reasoning you need to find the answer. I love when Dan Meyer says “math serves the conversation, conversation doesn’t serve the math.” If we force feed students the material, then it almost guarantees the won’t retain it because they did not have a need much less an interest to learn it. As Albert Einstein said, “the formulation of the problem is often more essential than its solution.” I encourage you to watch this short video to see how Mr. Meyer alters a textbook to create the need for math and presents it in a way that puts every student on a level playing field of intuition. Leave your thoughts in the comments below!

T. (2010, April 12). Dan Meyer at TEDxNYED. Retrieved November 28, 2016, from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BlvKWEvKSi8&index=14&list=PLbRLdW37G3oMquOaC-HeUIt6CWk-FzaGp