2013 May 14. Here’s a brief series on how to teach with three-act math tasks. It includes video.
2013 Apr 12. I’ve been working this blog post into curriculum ideas for a couple years now. They’re all available here.
Storytelling gives us a framework for certain mathematical tasks that is both prescriptive enough to be useful and flexible enough to be usable. Many stories divide into three acts, each of which maps neatly onto these mathematical tasks.
Act One
Introduce the central conflict of your story/task clearly, visually, viscerally, using as few words as possible.
With Jaws your first act looks something like this:
The visual is clear. The camera is in focus. It isn’t bobbing around so much that you can’t get your bearings on the scene. There aren’t any words. And it’s visceral. It strikes you right in the terror bone.
With math, your first act looks something like this:
The visual is clear. The camera is locked to a tripod and focused. No words are necessary. I’m not saying anyone is going to shell out ten dollars on date night to do this math problem but you have a visceral reaction to the image. It strikes you right in the curiosity bone.
Leave no one out of your first act. Your first act should impose as few demands on the students as possible — either of language or of math. It should ask for little and offer a lot. This, incidentally, is as far as the #anyqs challenge takes us.