Ohio Journal of School Mathematics | Issue: Issue: 1(75) Spring 2017 (2017)

Volume 75 • 2017 • Spring 2017

Several writers here are after the same thing from different directions: they want students to know why a procedure works, not just how to run it. Johanning and Haubert ask what a denominator really measures, treating it as a statement about size rather than a number under a bar. Jong, Thomas, Fisher, and their co-authors take a single student’s decimal mistake and walk preservice teachers through noticing what is behind it. Berger makes the case for number talks, those short daily conversations where students compare strategies and fluency grows out of understanding instead of repetition. Stupel and Sigler push the other way, solving one algebra problem three ways and asking how Pythagoras would have phrased it.

The rest of the issue turns that reasoning toward problems students already care about. Alhammouri, Durkee, and Foley walk high schoolers through deciding where to place a post, the kind of modeling task the Common Core describes but rarely shows in full. Frydryk builds a statistics lesson around body image and Barbie. Kuchey and Flick report early results from a C-STEM curriculum aimed at the achievement gap in the Northwest district, where the approach seems to help students who have long been underrepresented in mathematics.