Imagine aliens have abducted you. They’re kind enough creatures, however: Theirs is the slow-motion torture of trying to make you understand them. They flash their strange alphabet at you and prompt you with esoteric questions: Are you allowed to put this symbol here? To rearrange this into that? At first you struggle. Soon enough, though, you start to see patterns; eventually you begin to answer correctly.
This, Dan Meyer says, is how too many students experience mathematics. Meyer, 33, is perhaps the most famous math educator in America today. Good-looking and wholesome, he has long charmed audiences with a lopsided smile. He’s amassed more than 40,000 Twitter followers, and his TED Talk, despite its less-than-thrilling focus on math curricula, has been viewed more than two million times. Meyer’s out to change the way students learn math—to make the subject feel like an illuminating journey through the real world, rather than an abduction into an alien culture. “I need a question to carry me through my thirties,” he wrote this summer on his blog. “I can’t think of a better one than, ‘What does the math textbook of the future look like?’”
Read the entire article on the New Republic website.
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