Reply To: Lesson 5-5: Question

[Christine Pomatto]

I look forward to trying this strategy in class. I have many students who either give up quickly or ask for lots of hints, and focus only on the answer (not the process). During this lesson, I was thinking a lot about our proportional relationships unit, where students have to learn how to make tables, graphs, equations, etc. from a story and also decide if those are proportional or not. We consistently do a lot of lecturing in this unit, to teach students about k (constant of proportionality) and how it shows up in various forms (y = kx, k = y/x, unit rate, etc.). However, students rarely make these connections themselves and just try to memorize everything (partially our fault!). I’m excited to try a lesson similar to this one (with easier numbers) where students might figure out many ways to represent their solutions before we have even learned about the constant of proportionality.