Ohio Journal of School Mathematics | Issue: Issue: 1(76) Summer 2017 (2017)

Volume 76 • 2017 • Summer 2017

The papers in this issue keep circling the same teaching move: following students into the part of the lesson nobody planned, and treating that as the mathematics rather than a detour from it. Scott States starts with graphing technology that hands back a “wrong” answer and asks what a teacher does next, since the work is helping students read the output instead of trusting it. Shelly Sheats Harkness and Bethany Noblitt replay classroom video to play Elbow’s believing game after the fact, looking for the merit in one student’s comment, which opens onto the historical tie between perimeter and circumference. S. Asli Ozgun-Koca and Michael Meagher watch students reach for recursion on their own in the Trout Pond task once spreadsheets are in their hands.

The same instinct shows up in the elementary articles. Dittika Gupta, Suzanne Lindt, and Diana Moss give 4th and 5th graders a hands-on, real-world task and follow the reasoning and the struggle that come out of it. Rachael Eriksen Brown, Zora Mackiewicz-Wolfe, and Susan Tily describe push and support cards, a way to keep a high-demand task alive for a whole class without flattening it to fit. Read together, the issue is less about any one activity than about what teachers do when students take a problem somewhere the plan did not go.