Customer Reviews

The Great Math Experience: Engaging Problems for Middle School Mathematics

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

This book is great! It's small but every single idea in it is useful. My students just don't respond well to me standing up and talking about math for the whole period. They LOVE the problems in this book and we refer back to them all the time. The water hose problem is a great problem that helps kids undestand at least a semi-practical use for adding fractions with unlike denominators. My kids had a great discussion about it and even made posters explaining their answers.
We also liked the locker problem. It's an old one that I had used before, but not to the extent that this book describes. The kids really understood factoring and the different types of numbers. Even better, the locker problem helped me (the grown up!) to answer a question on the Middle School Math Praxis, which was a killer exam! I highly recommend this book -- no wonder Harry Wong put his name on it.

This book is very thin, so do not expect volume (it is only 93 pages long). Instead the value here is in quality over quantity. The fifteen ideas for lesson plans presented here are great and very engaging. The author also provides an indepth analysis of each and offers extensions. Very useful and highly recommended.

Don't let the size of this book mislead you. The problems presented in this book were engaging and challenging for my middle school algebra classes. Each problem has a well written explanation of the solution and extensions . I would definitely recommend this book to anyone teaching middle school math.

In the introduction to the book, Field states, "I have personally experienced students who transform from math-haters to math lovers, largely due to these types of problems and the discourse they stimulate."

That is quite a statement, but from my limited teaching experience I have every reason to believe that it is correct. Many years ago I did some substitute teaching. Since I was never given an assignment I frequently gave recreational math problems to the students. I was most pleasantly surprised by the enthusiasm that the problems generated.

In this short book, Field shows that he goes far beyond what I did. After having the students work on their own, he initiates discussions around the problems, allowing students to benefit from each other's insights. He also relates the problems to related areas of mathematics. The book reproduces some of this dialog and I found it quite interesting.

There is a view of students as being lazy and unmotivated. If you read this book you will see that this is simply not the case. Students like to be challenged. They would not play video games if the games were easy. What students do not want is rules without explanation and endless and repetitive exercises. There is a better way of teaching math than is currently being done. Having much of the curriculum being devoted to challenging or open ended problems engages the students, increases their appreciation of mathematics and sharpens their skills. For a somewhat more academic treatment of problem centered learning I recommend Experiencing School Mathematics by Jo Boaler.

I have two suggestions for any reprintings of this book. In chapter 10, the students are able to work out a formula empirically, which is quite okay, but there is no attempt to then verify the formula analytically. This can be done, with perhaps some assistance, using only the mathematics available to students in middle school.

In chapter 12, it is stated that writing a googolplex in 12-point font would stretch from here to Pluto and back six times. With all due respect for the author, the 10^100 digits of googolplex is unimaginably large. I suggest as an exercise to determine the order of magnitude in inches of the 28 billion light year diameter of the visible universe and see how far short of 100 that it falls.

This has been a great tool for getting kids to think outside of the box... The solutions aren't listed like you would expect, but it's not hard to figure out the answers.

This book has some excellent problems to get students thinking. I was expecting a little more out of it. Some of te problems were great real world situations others seemed forced into a real world situation.

When I previewed the book on-line, it looked "great" like the title indicates. When I got the book, I was disappointed. There is very little that I can use in the classroom. I don't see any of the activities really capturing the interest of my students.

I did not find this book at all useful. I work with students struggling in math and found Marilyn Burns to be much more helpful.