Reading the NY Times today I saw a blog post regarding the MTA's vote to raise the price for 30-day and weekly metro passes as well as individual fares. What caught my eye was that the article described one increase (for the 30-day passes) in terms of percent increase. That was all I needed.
Following the Meyer method, I got an image of the article and blacked out the percent increase answer for the students. I asked them to predict what the percent increase could be. We investigated the problem. I demonstrated how to find percent increase, which only a few of the students seemed to have learned before. Then, we checked our answer against a clean copy of the article that I printed later.
Overall, there was some learning and some excitement, but I can't help thinking that I could have done this better. What could I have done differently?
Before:
After:
Notes for next time:
- Next time black out the answer in Keynote, then print. My students spent a ridiculous amount of time trying to read through the dark splotch that I made with my pen before making copies.
- We tied in our steps for problem solving (Understand, Plan, Answer, Check) a bit too late. It would have really helped to direct their frustrations if we were introducing the structure earlier.
- The guessing/estimating gets a little distracting because the students attempt to revise their guess at each stage in our problem-solving process. It needs to be stated more clearly that while we can keep revising the end is to have a solution, not a guess.
