by Susan Jo Russell | Mar 9, 2020 |
In a blog post over a year ago, I wrote about the importance of using story contexts to support students in developing mental images of the operations. In that post, I concluded: “Along with pictures, drawings, diagrams, equations, and physical models, story contexts...
by Susan Jo Russell | Oct 22, 2018 |
When people want to make a joke about how difficult, convoluted, or inaccessible word problems are, they often cite some version of the “two trains” problem. You can see an example of this problem here: Maybe you want to try solving this problem yourself before...
by Susan Jo Russell | Jan 26, 2018 |
I was watching one of those legal shows on TV the other night. The prosecutor was asking the defendant a version of the same question for the third time. The defendant’s lawyer, getting annoyed, objected: “Asked and answered!” I’ve heard this phrase a hundred times in...
by Susan Jo Russell | Oct 2, 2017 |
Over the last decade, much of my work has been focused on mathematical argument in the elementary classroom. Observing in our collaborating classrooms, I was struck again and again by how teachers supported students to build on each other’s incomplete ideas....
