Understanding Middle School Math: Cool Problems to Get Students Thinking and Connecting

by Arthur Hyde, Susan Friedlander, Cheryl Heck

A book of cool problems for middle school mathematics classrooms-does it get any better? Yes, it does. Art Hyde and his colleagues go far beyond providing a collection of problems. They address big ideas, make connections, nurture the use of varied representations, and provide vivid accounts of actual classroom implementation. -Judith Zawojewski Board of Directors, NCTM Imagine handing students state-by-state data on the number of gallons of soft drinks sold per person in one year. Imagine using it to lead a vibrant problem-solving session in which students energetically pose and answer mathematical questions: Why does it say sold instead of consumed ? What IS a soft drink? Is it the same as soda? Who would collect this kind of data? Why would they collect it? How was gallons per person calculated? What was the total amount of soda sold in our state? How many 12 ounce cans is that? 20 ounce bottles? How many of each per person? Understanding Middle School Math gathers 50 cool problems like this that lead to deep thinking. Problems such as the Renovation Problem, in which students uncover ideas about how perimeter, area, length, and cost affect a construction project. Or Chocolate Algebra, where they discover linear relationships among the pocket money available to buy two differently priced chocolate candies. Arthur Hyde combines the latest research and decades of classroom experience to braid language, cognition, and math. His approach can help any student, including underprepared ones, with the rigors of math in middle school and beyond. He has created and adapted problems that strongly connect math to the real world, to students' lives, and to prior knowledge. Problems that scaffold content and processes, and give students multiple entry points into learning. Every problem has been extensively field tested and refined by classroom teachers. And for each cool problem practicing middle school teachers describe how they used it to differentiate over a wide range of students and extend learning. For fantastic problems your students won't soon forget and teaching solutions that are exciting, substantial, and transformative, turn to Art Hyde. Read and use Understanding Middle School Math and pass your love of math on as you meet your classroom goals.

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Genres: Mathematics, Education

280 pages, Paperback

First published April 16, 2009

Reviews

[Jeff · Rating 4 out of 5]

This companion book to Comprehending Math is useful as an outline of both the content and the instruction of a strong middle school math curriculum focused on developing students conceptual understanding of mathematics. Hyde rearranges the concepts in the five strands of content standards in mathematics to illuminate the connections across strands and then lays out open-ended problems that students can grapple with as they develop their understanding of the mathematics involved.

I have two general criticisms of this book. The first minor critique is that there is a number of problems that overlap with Comprehending Math so they are repetetive. That said, the layout of this book that focuses on the curriculum and laying out the content in a way that a teacher can make decisions about what to teach makes the problems easier to access to target specific content. In Comprehending Math, it is difficult to do this because the book is more about how to teach the problem solving process to students than the concepts you are teaching.

My second criticism is a bit larger and that is that there are a number of errors in the book, that an editor should have caught. The errors are not just in grammar, but also in the math and that really is unacceptable in a math book, particularly for middle and elementary teachers that may be not as adept at some of the concepts covered as they should be.

Regardless, of this error, I think the book is indispensible as a resource for developing a strong mathematics program at the middle school level.