KQED News Mind/Shift – Katrina Schwartz
“Educators who have bought into the power of inquiry-based teaching will admit that math is one of the most challenging areas to apply the pedagogy. Math has been taught based on computation for so long and built up such a bad reputation with many students that it can be hard to break through students’ anxiety, intimidation and hatred of math. As Dan Meyer said in his 2010 Tedx Talk, “I sell a product to a market that doesn’t want it, but is forced by law to buy it.” After six years in the classroom and a doctorate in math education from Stanford, Meyer is now the Chief Academic Officer at Desmos. But his blog has long been a go-to resource for teachers looking for different ways to inspire what he calls “patient problem-solving” in students. He says to help students develop mathematical reasoning, teachers need to focus less on the computation side of math, and more on helping kids determine which pieces of information are useful, which are extraneous and how it all fits into the real world.”(more)