ED 411 Teaching Children Mathematics

Fall 2003

WEEK #1 ASSIGNMENT

Due as indicated below.

  1. Read the course syllabus carefully. Please send me an email message () with your comments, reactions, suggestions, and questions by Monday, September 8, at 5 pm.
  1. Complete the initial survey available on the assignments page of our course website( Send me an emailwith your survey attached by Monday, September 8, at 5 pm.

Put task#3 in your notebook:

  1. Read M. Lampert, Teaching Problems and the Problems of Teaching, chapters 1 – 3 (pp. 1 – 50). New Haven: Yale University Press.

Begin a section on professional reading in your mathematics notebook. Use a two column format to write in your notebook: On the left-hand side write 3 – 5 main points that stood out to you from each article, including direct quotes where useful. On the right-hand side, write (a) questions or thoughts that a particular point raised for you about your own teaching, or the teaching you are observing this term (in your field placement, in this course, in the third grade classroom we are studying); (b) things you want to try in your own teaching based on something in the article.

Turn in tasks #4 and #5 at the beginning of our next class meeting:

  1. What stood out about our first work on mathematics together (in our class)? What features of this mathematics task and the ways in which we worked on it might have made it a good choice for the beginning of the year? What features might have made it not a good choice?
  1. Extending the coin problem: Beginning to learn to scale problems up and down

Compare the two-coin version of the problem that the third graders did in the video (with pennies, nickels, and dimes) to the two-coin version that we did in class (with pennies, nickels, dimes, and quarters). How do the solution sets compare? How does their difficulty compare in terms of finding solutions, and in terms of showing that you have all the solutions?

The question above is the required, basic assignment. If you would like to work further, and do *more* than satisfactory work, you might try one of the following options. These are not intended as extra credit, but meant to give you ideas about what it means to do more in-depth work as a teacher. If you have other ideas that you would like to pursue to go into more depth, you are welcome to try one of those instead.

*a): What if you change the question from, “What amounts of money might I have?” to “What combinations of coins could I pull out?” Is the problem easier or harder? Is the number of solutions the same or different?

or

*b): Compare the difficulty of the two-coin, three-coin, and four-coin versions of the pennies-nickels-and-dimes question:

I have pennies, nickels, and dimes in my pocket. If I pull out ____ (two, three, or four) coins, what amounts of money might I have?

Compare the difficulty of each version, and explain why.

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