Where do questions come from, part 2

In part 1 of this discussion, Dan Meyer gave his take on where questions in math class come from, or should come from. Dan’s position could be summarized this way: Everybody in my class can’t be working on their own question; I can’t manage that. At the same time, I don’t want to force questions down students’ throats because I use up a lot of my authority doing so. So I want to create classroom situations in which the questions we are answering seem as natural as possible to students. 

Here in part 2, Karim responds to the same question, having heard Dan’s thoughts. He points to an important difference between Dan’s work and his own. In a Mathalicious lesson, the questions are written down on a handout. In a Dan Meyer 3 Act lesson, the questions arise from the class’s experience with a video or photograph; the questions are not fixed in writing.

But neither are the questions especially open. Recall that Dan said in part 1, “I get that at some point the teacher’s going to have to say, This is what we’re going to do today.”

So maybe an important difference between these two isn’t so much where the questions come from (although you’ll soon see that Karim thinks about this very differently from Dan), as it is where they appear to students to have come from. In both cases, questions come from the lesson’s author. Dan is very concerned with student investment in this question-with whether students see the question as the natural one to ask. Karim seems less concerned with this latter issue.

Karim: So if you look at a Mathalicious handout; for example, how many color combinations are there available on Nike ID? And at what point does that cause paralysis by analysis? Or the health insurance one. That’s not something that can at all be encapsulatable in a single piece of multimedia.

And so therefore, we have to lay this narrative. But when we do it, if you look at the handouts, there are very few periods. They’re almost all questions. Every question is a legitimate question.

[We ask] So what do you think…if the insurance company has to charge the same price, how much are they gonna charge? And what do you think is gonna happen next?

And, yeah, like there’s gonna be an answer to that. But the question is a sincere one.

And so then the question is where does that question come from? Because that clearly is a bit more kind of paternalistic than Here’s a piece of multimedia, let’s as a class, let’s talk about what the questions are and then for the sake of efficacy let’s decide on one, but that one kind of came from you guys, kind of the democracy of you.

Mathalicious lessons are quite different from that. So where do those questions come from? I don’t know. I don’t know how to answer this. You know our goal is to be Socratic, and so where did Socrates’s questions come from?

And I don’t know how to answer that without just coming back to this idea of art. You know? Where did the Ninth come from? I really believe that if you ask Beethoven where the Ninth came from, I think he would say, The Ninth existed; my job was to conduct the Ninth. And I mean conduct as in I am a conduit for the Ninth. 

Christopher: In a Platonistic sense.

Karim: Yeah. The Ninth was out there and it’s this sublime piece of music. The Ninth was out there and it was just waiting for somebody to hear it and write it down. And similarly I do think that there are just questions that are really interesting. These questions want to be asked. And so…who’s asking that? I have no idea.

But I can tell you that, as someone who has spent years writing these scripts, I can tell you when a question feels forced and I can tell you when a question feels like it’s flowing. And when it feels like it’s flowing, it does not feel like it’s flowing from me.

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