Dan Meyer: If Your Content is The Aspirin, How Do You Create the Headache?

Episode 011: Dan Meyer, Desmos
Dan Meyer has been revolutionizing math instruction for years, and in this episode he shares with us the importance of mentors in his life, a few of his favorite teaching mantras, mathematics as storytelling, and how to notice and develop perplexity.

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Connect with Dan Meyer
Twitter: @ddmeyer | Website: blog.mrmeyer.com | Desmos

Links & Show Notes

• Math is a (usually poorly told) story (02:22)
• Put students in a place to experience new learning through a need
• Dan’s math journey & mentors (4:20)
• “Be Less Helpful” (6:58)
• Let students do the interesting, important work of the thinking about the problem
• Thanksgiving dinner task example - by giving all the information necessary you’re making the problem less interesting, losing the opportunity for deeper thinking, and blocking some students out
• Discovery learning in the math classroom (9:52)
• You can always add, you can’t subtract (11:08)
• Once you add information, you change the nature of the challenge
• 3-act math (Dan Meyer’s spreadsheet; Dan Meyer’s ‘How-to’ / Graham Fletcher’s EL resources (12:39)
• Bucky the Badger task / Blog write up
• One 5th grade student: “While we were figuring it out, our ideas changed and it changed the question we were asking.”
• Subtract stuff from the problems in your curriculum (18:38)
• Popcorn container task
• Benjamin Baxter (20:23)
• “Never assume anyone even cares.”
• Teach math as though it were an elective
• Perplexity / Curiosity: Teaching as a science - reproducible (24:23)
• “Developing curiosity in ourselves and capturing those curious moments and presenting them in curious ways for other people, that has to be an ongoing discipline.”
• Benefits of being a connected educator (27:31)
• Quick growth; posing open questions and semi-formed ideas
• Memorization in math (30:26)
• Driving analogy
• Having as much as you can in your long-term memory makes more interesting work possible
• Practice with purpose, mix frequently with purposeful activities (not memorization drills)
• Offer them pictures of where their memorization will be used
• Math assessment (35:07)
• Break learning objectives down into smaller grains of learning and assess on each
• Standards-based Grading
• Talk to him more about this @ddmeyer
• Desmos (38:04)
• Free calculators
• Polygraph game
• If [vocabulary] is the aspirin, what is the headache?
• Students solve problems created by each other
• Teacher.desmos.com for more free resources
• Dan’s TED Talk
• tinyurl.com/vrainwavesfeedback
• Lots of other videos of Dan’s keynotes, ideas, etc…
• Sign up for Dan’s newsletter on his blog