{"id":4497,"date":"2025-10-29T07:08:18","date_gmt":"2025-10-29T12:08:18","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.mctmmathbits.org\/?p=4497"},"modified":"2025-10-22T19:10:38","modified_gmt":"2025-10-23T00:10:38","slug":"how-i-helped-my-students-question-the-questions","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.mctmmathbits.org\/?p=4497","title":{"rendered":"How I Helped My Students Question the Questions"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">By: Alexis Wolf, Region 4 Director<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">I am currently teaching a unit on proportional relationships to my seventh graders. They are showing great connections of representations and their methods to solve problems are overall strong. The issue: I am starting to create fantastic calculators that do not really see the context in which they are working.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">We came across two different problems on two separate days that brought my attention to how important it is for my students to truly question what they are working on. First problem: \u201cA restaurant sells 6 spring rolls to feed 3 people. Complete the table\u201d (and the table has various values, including figuring out how many people 1 spring roll feeds). Now, in my world, one person will eat that one spring roll. However, for the sake of ensuring students can see the constant of proportionality, we determined one spring roll feeds half of a person. Once it clicked in my mind what we just calculated, I legitimately paused my class and looked at them. Are we really suggesting this?\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">The second problem: \u201cYou are hiring a person to moderate comments on a social media page. Here is information about four different people. Who would you hire?\u201d My proportional thinkers could immediately find the constant of proportionality (essentially the unit rate) for each person. And guess what we found? The four people could review 250 to 331 comments in 1 minute. Again, I paused them all. Are these super humans we are hiring?<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Here is my lesson learned: remember to really dive into some of the problems before teaching, because context matters. Or, if I am ever back in the same position where I was underprepared and end up finding these problems out in real time (which happens more than I would like to admit), remind myself to pause and have my students question the question.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>By: Alexis Wolf, Region 4 Director I am currently teaching a unit on proportional relationships to my seventh graders. They<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[14],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4497","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-announcements"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5riSd-1ax","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mctmmathbits.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4497","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mctmmathbits.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mctmmathbits.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mctmmathbits.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mctmmathbits.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4497"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.mctmmathbits.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4497\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4498,"href":"https:\/\/www.mctmmathbits.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4497\/revisions\/4498"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mctmmathbits.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4497"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mctmmathbits.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4497"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mctmmathbits.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4497"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}