I've been following the blog "Math Mistakes" for the last several months. It is basically a blog site where teachers submit mistakes their students make on math tests, quizzes, practice problems, etc and then open the comments up for analyzing, evaluating, and trying to figure out how to help the student based on what they did wrong. I think it's absolutely brilliant... I have yet to submit any of my kids' mistakes (I need to have a camera with me when I'm grading!), but I am definitely going to start doing so.
So, as I get new posts daily/weekly from Math Mistakes in my Google Reader, I keep thinking... I want to do something with this in my classroom.
As an experiment this semester (and since I'll only be in the classroom another 7-8 weeks, I'm just testing the waters to see what I want to do for next year), I put together an "extra credit" opportunity for my Math Analysis students to play around with the Math Mistakes blog posts.
Here are their instructions:
Students have to choose the Math Mistakes post they want to work with (I have them all organized by Unit on the Google Form) and write a blog post (they all have their own blogs) like the following:
FIRST:
Title of Math Mistakes problem HYPERLINKED with the actual link to their blog page
NEXT:
Describe the mistake that was made fully, completely, and in detail. Be very specific. If possible, it would help to annotate their picture with what was wrong (many ways to do this, you can ask in class)
LAST:
How should they have solved it instead? A picture of your work would be helpful.
EXTRA:
--If there is a question posed in the Math Mistakes blog post, answer it.
--If there are comments on the blog post, respond to a specific person's thoughts
--Add your own comment to the blog post and mention that so I can check it out!
I think this is a great way to have students analyzing and evaluating math work. I want to start collecting more problems from my own tests and quizzes as I see them and build the library of "mistakes" that we can analyze and work with.
What I'm liking best so far (I've had four kids do it in the last week) is that they have to not only FIND the mistake and explain what was wrong, but then they also have to solve it correctly themselves.
Two of the submissions I've gotten so far can be found here and here. Feel free to comment on their posts!
What would YOU do with "Math Mistakes" in your classroom? Share in the comments...