Re: education, technology & chat (The Mathematics of it)

["Peg Griffin" <Peg.Griffin@worldnet.att.net>]

Hi,
Wow in the portland schools, huh?  Terrific.

Can you get operations and their models with their strategy variants into
the stream as problems of equality of measured continuous quantity (free of
numbers)?  A > B (Jenny's amount of clay is greater than Sasha's and it
isn't fair) so how do you get A=B  but by getting some C so that A-C and
B+C.  From clay models to drawings of it to lines about it to letters for
it -- and you can model all the different operations situations that Siegler
and his folks get into.  There is no doubt that numbers will creep in too
soon because non-continuous quantity entities will, but at least there is
some escape from a put-aside unit for measurement, maybe?

Peg

--- Original Message ----- 
From: "Peter Moxhay" <moxhap@portlandschools.org>
To: <xmca@weber.ucsd.edu>
Sent: Thursday, November 11, 2004 1:55 PM
Subject: Re: education, technology & chat (The Mathematics of it)


> Peg, you wrote:
>
> > he portlandschools in your e-mil address.  I want
> > to know more about it.
>
> It's the Portland, Maine, public school system.
>
> > So, no, I haven't gotten it central, but I get measurement and
> > modeling of
> > operations in by whatever means necessary.  Number words, count lists
> > of
> > them, the Gelman and Gallistel and following stuff, and the info about
> > number word structuring in other languages -- it can be a useful
> > complication for numbers curricula, don't you think?
>
> Of course! There are many ways to go about it. Getting the points you
> mentioned
> added into a traditional introduction of number is a really good start.
>
> The challenge for me has been, though, to keep the measurement-based
> approach from being pushed off to the side as a "unit" -- a nice way to
> do "measurement "
> for a couple of weeks and then we move on to another, unrelated topic.
> AT-based approaches have such potential for a qualitative change in how
> concepts are
> developed in children -- engaging teachers and administrators in a
> dialogue on this
> is a task of a different order of magnitude, I've found.
>
> Peter
>
>