Math makeover?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NWUFjb8w9Ps

This is a great TED talk about Math Class needing a makeover by Dan Meyer.

I enjoy his opening quote how as a High School Math Teacher he is selling "a product to a market that doesn't want it but is forced by law to buy it."  How true is that?  I have encountered many students throughout my years of tutoring that dislike math for one reason or another.

I also enjoy his ideas on how to improve on teaching a math class.  He suggests "use multimedia" which I did extensively in my classroom during internship.  He also says as a teacher we must "encourage student intuition" and "ask the shortest question you can."  I definitely can see his point of bringing word problems to life by actually solving the problem in real life (he demonstrates how long it takes to fill a water tank).  He suggests that teachers should "let students build the problem" and "be less helpful."  I definitely agree with him that textbook teach students in all the wrong ways.  My mathematics curriculum class showed me how reliant I am on finding out what the answer is right away, a problem with students who have had the answers at the back of the book all their lives.

Math textbook problems tend to direct the student and be too helpful.  He is right to question whether we are teaching our students math or how they should "decode a textbook."  As a student, I could always figure out how to do problems by looking at the examples at the beginning of the chapter. 

It is definitely a challenge to teach math, let alone trying to teach it in a way in which you have never been taught.  I look forward to bringing some of the ideas Dan brought to light into my own classroom.