Today I took entirely too long on Laced Travelers. However, I am beginning to realize how this curriculum gives me so many opportunities to identify my students' misconceptions. I have never really realized this before. They may be able to tell you their numerical answer. BUT they may have just gotten lucky because they just randomly added or multiplied or etc... When you ask them what that number really means is when the real meat of a discussion happens. In my other textbooks and tasks I often didn't have a meaning to refer back to. WOW! So many of my students were SO FAR OFF in the Laced Travelers activity. They just multiplied a couple of numbers and got an answer. There were multiple approaches that worked so I would ask them what that answer meant. I would also ask them if the answer was significant to the task. THEY DIDN'T KNOW... I did ALOT of talking today once we identified that their number sense was so far off on these problems. Maybe I talked too much...but I think they really learned something...I HOPE!
This activity probably took twice as long as it should but if felt meaningful...
I wrote the above paragraph after my 2ndd block class. Many of the same things occurred during my 3rd block class. They made up some great problems for #2. When we started creating variables they did things a little differently than my 2nd block. This led into a realization (by me) of how dimensional analysis can help a little with making sense of the algebraic expressions. We had covered dimensional analysis earlier in the year but it was a struggle for my students.
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