Another "Great Moment" in Teaching

In this New York Times Magazine article, "Building a Better Teacher," there's a wonderful little vignette about a math class in which a boy, Sean, starts to assert that 6 is both an odd and even number. As he provides his rationale, the teacher (Deborah Ball), does not correct him, but rather invites the class to offer their ideas.

The Sean video is a case in point. Ball had a goal for that day’s lesson, and it was not to investigate the special properties of the number six. Yet by entertaining Sean’s odd idea, Ball was able to teach the class far more than if she had stuck to her lesson plan. By the end of the day, a girl from Nigeria had led the class in deriving precise definitions of even and odd; everyone — even Sean — had agreed that a number could not be both odd and even; and the class had coined a new, special type of number, one that happens to be the product of an odd number and two. They called them Sean numbers. Other memorable moments from the year include a day when they derived the concept of infinity (“You would die before you counted all the numbers!” one girl said) and another when an 8-year-old girl proved that an odd number plus an odd number will always equal an even number.

What I love about this vignette is not simply that the teacher allowed the students to "play with" the math--come up with their own theories and challenge and test them until they arrived at a group consensus that underscores a much deeper understanding of math--but also the sense of learning community that must be evident here for this process to have unfolded the way it did. This speaks to the power of the teacher setting the tone for individual and collective inquiry in her class, rather than a focus on work and correct answers.