If you'd like to help students learn math and also learn about their own capacity for brilliant thinking, there's one place in this lesson you shouldn't miss.
After students have spent some time working on the card sort, click the "Overview" button from the teacher tab and check out the most common incorrect card. In lots of classes, I'm noticing that students have this card incorrectly categorized as "False." A common wrong answer like that is a vein of gold that you can trace back to a motherlode of interesting student thinking.
Consider pausing students to say, "This is a card where we're having a lot of disagreement. True or false? Tell a neighbor how you're deciding which it is."
Tell me about a different world.
You have several options here. You can help them see that on a number line -5 is to the left of -4, that this card is "true." That'll help students learn about math.
But another special move here is to ask students, "Tell me about a different world. What's a change you could make to that card so that it'd be false, like lots of you originally thought?"
It's a wonderful thing for students to learn not only what mathematical truth looks like, but how much mathematical truth is in even their incorrect answers. I get very excited thinking about the ways our curriculum and your teaching can change student minds and hearts about mathematics.
Dan & the Desmos Classroom Team
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