What are my professional goals? Many days, I’ve got precisely three: I want kids to feel curious, then frustrated, then ohhhhhhhh.
Math is pretty great for this. It’s full of puzzles and mysteries. Why do the angles in a triangle always sum to the same thing? How many moons would fill the sun? Why is it so hard to roll double sixes? There’s plenty here to excite curiosity, to elicit frustration, and to satisfy the intellectual itch for ohhhhhhh.
But there’s a common problem: too often, kids can beat the puzzles without feeling any of those things.
I find this, for example, with lines in the coordinate plane.
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