Michael Pershan asked:
Students don't like to write about their reasoning. They don't present their work in a way that allows anyone else to comprehend their path to a solution. But we want kids to write about their reasoning. Conflict! Drama!
Why do kids hate writing about math?
I am currently trying to grade my students arguments (as prosecutors) for the murder mystery. Some of them really got into it. Most still didn't explain the math well. My take on this is that students will write (maybe even well) if we give them a good enough context.
In the other conversation, Mr. Honner blogged about what happens when you zoom in super far on Desmos, looking for the hole in a rational function. It gets a bit crazy. The conversation got more interesting for me when Alan Eliasen started explaining "interval arithmetic", which I had never heard of.
Posts
Ugh, now I have two more blogs to read.
ReplyDelete;)
Oh good. (Your comment at an old post at Mr. Honner's blog made me re-read. I cringed at my comment. Don't know why I wasn't following the logic the first time in the proof.)
ReplyDeleteSue,
ReplyDeleteI think the reason why students hate writing about math is that the type of writing expected of students in math class is often quite shallow compared to how it could be used to develop deep mathematical thinking. It is a few years old, but I consider Dr. Hsu's primer on Writing math in paragraph style to be the gold standard on developing deep mathematical thinking through writing in the classroom.
But that's just my two cents.
Glenn Laniewski
Blog:
autismplusmath
Latest post:
Math teachers, start baking your Pi Day pies early