Blog 7 - Relevance

In class we raised the idea that good problems/tasks should be relevant to the lives of students. What has your experiences regarding the mathematics tasks that you experienced as a student? What about a as a teacher? Do you see relevance as a valid focus for the midddle grades mathematics teacher?

I remember completing a lot of problems straight out of the book when I was in school. Teachers would assign 1-25 odd or something like that. They were typically straight algorithms, few in word problem format. I didn't mind that they weren't relevant or engaging. I still enjoyed doing them. Other students in my classes didn't seem to mind either. We knew what we had to do and we did it. Today, students don't seem to have the same work ethic. They don't really even want to complete tasks that are relevant, so they surely wouldn't have wanted to do the problems I had to complete as a student. I try my best to make problems relevant for students. I make up a lot of my own word problems for them based on events/things they've told me. I'll use students names in the problems. They usually focus on things like music, sports, and other things of interest. I think relevance is so important in math today. You have to make things engaging for students, and part of being engaging is being relevant. They have so many other things like video games and computers that engage they in such high-tech, fast-paced ways, it's hard to compete. So if tasks aren't relevant, they think they'll never use this info.