My class always welcomes conjectures. This is made explicit on the very first day of the semester. This goes for everything from grade nine to grade twelve. As the grades advance, the topics have us venturing into increasingly abstract concepts, but conjectures are always honoured.
Certain class structures promote conjecturing more than others. Students offer questions during lectures, but they are often of a surface variety. They notice a pattern that has occurred in three straight examples, or think they have discovered a short-cut. I don’t like using tricks, but if they are “discovered” or “re-invented” (to borrow a term from Piaget and genetic epistemology), then we use them.
Month: June 2014
Categories
Garbage Can Task
The following task happened by accident:
I was about to introduce a problem to my Math 9 Enriched class that we were going to complete with group whiteboards. Before I could introduce, life got in the way. Students wanted to know about their most recent examination. As I launched into a speech on their performance, a student got up to sharpen their pencil. She walked right in front of me. I made a comment, and she replied that the garbage can should be in the back corner where it would be more convenient.
The other day, a future teacher asked what one piece of advice I would give to a soon-to-be mathematics teacher. I immediately had several. I settled on one that I felt encapsulated my belief both in and out of class:
Honour curiosity.
In class, this finds me wandering through student suggestions and constantly posing new problems that create relevant challenges. Curiosity (both student and teacher) keeps a vibrant ecology going, and I would argue that the intellectual tension so often provided through curiosity is necessary for a positive ecology to thrive.