WCYDWT: Fare HIke

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.

WCYDWT Challenge: Tie Clip

I spotted this very stylish tie clip on one of our school's staff members. Apparently he wears it nearly everyday, but I just noticed it.

I'm wondering what can you do with this? What would you ask students to discover? What would you ask them to explain?

Addendum: When I first saw this number pattern on the tie clip, I thought this could make for a nice easy introduction to looking for mathematics in everyday life. This number pattern itself is so simple "3, 6, 9, 12", but the presentation in Roman numerals makes it a little more enriching. We have some number theory lessons coming up and talking about Roman versus Arabic numerals could be a nice conversation starter. Plus, I like this really simple pattern to introduce students to the WCYDWT framework.

What most excites me about this whole idea though is how accessible it is to all the students in our Grades 1 to 12 building. The next step is to scale this larger and make it open to more people to contribute their own ideas and images. Why can't students take photos for themselves of interesting objects around the school? We have an upcoming pep rally and I'd love to see this be able to launch as a website before then so that we can roll this out as a competition among grades, something that builds up our school's culture.

So far, I've passed this image around just enough for a few staff members to find out whose tie and tie clip this is while a few more are still looking. Some of them were thrown off by looking for the tie itself and not the tie clip. Meanwhile, the owner has been wearing it something like 4 out of 5 days now. So far this has been a conversation starter for just a few of us who would probably talk anyway and maybe a few more still who just didn't have that much to talk about before. What can we all do next?