NancyLebovitz comments on How to Teach Students to Not Guess the Teacher’s Password? - Less Wrong Discussion
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That's an excellent talk-- Dan Meyer has something to protect. He's going to be living in the future made by the people who are learning (or not learning) math now. Sometimes scope insensitivity is useful.
He's evoking intrinsic motivation rather than trying to use grades as a substitute for it.
He's doing that and more. He's showing the children that math is more than the memorization of it's parts. Math is not an arbitrary set of rules that we learn because... adults make them learn it.
He's showing them that the universe runs on predictable rules. Math just happens to be how we express those rules. Even more important than building intrinsic motivation is that they get to see what a reductionist universe looks like.