Ohio Journal of School Mathematics | Issue: Issue: 1(77) Fall 2017 (2017)

Volume 77 • 2017 • Fall 2017

Ask a class for the next terms after 3, 6, 9 and most will say 12, 15, 18 and stop there. Walker and McBurney spend their article showing that the blanks can be filled infinitely many ways, with an explicit formula behind each choice. The same suspicion of a single right answer runs through Swain’s variations on the Fibonacci rabbit problem and DeWater’s North Pole puzzle, where students hunt for the pattern rather than wait to be handed it. Lane follows her students to a generalization of the interior angles of a convex polygon that she had not planned to reach.

What I like about this issue is how willing its authors are to say a lesson missed. Bare and Simon built a rich task as student teachers, watched their students skip the concept entirely, and traced the problem back to their own scaffolding before writing a rubric to fix it. Kruse, Schlosser, and Bostic report on a two-hour session that left teachers wanting more time with the Standards for Mathematical Practice, and Flick and Kuchey close the loop with results and sample problems from the 2017 Ohio Mathematics Tournament.