What’s the first question that comes to your mind?
Dan Meyer, prolific blogger, high school math teacher, and current Ph.D. student at Stanford wants to know. Dan has decided that there are way too many artificial scenarios in his high school math texts that pretend to model the world. He wants to see the real world in his math class because he sees the math in the real world.
101qs.com is the brainchild of Dan Meyer. On this site, anyone can post an image or a short video and let the world ask the math questions that naturally arise from the scene.
From this, he and many of his followers have created lessons where the students can generate the questions (probably the ones that the teacher has in mind), ask for any relevant information they need, and solve real problems the way they would in the real world.
It’s fantastic – check it out, but don’t be surprised if you find yourself seeing math problems everywhere.
How about this one?
How many do you think there are? What number is just too many? What number is too few? Be brave.
What do you need to know?
Yesterday my students and I were examining place value to the ten-thousandths place and it reminded me of this kind of thinking. How many grains of sand could you hold in both hands cupped together? How many in a child’s bucket? How large an area of grass would contain 10,000 blades of grass?
I think that fostering curiosity in our students is even more important than teaching them any of the content of math. Exercising the brain with the 101 Questions site is a great way to do this.