Drawn Into the Fun

It all started with one of those “if you get this, you are a critical thinker” brain teasers posted on Facebook.  I should have moved on, but I love brain teasers and the ‘critical thinker’ part beckoned.
It eventually more/less ended with one of my friends jokingly telling me that I ‘would debate the wetness of water!’  Like I said, I should have known better.
I will share the brain teaser, but slightly altered.  This will likely hurt some of the context, and ruin part of the fun.  But I suspect you’ll deduce my reasons. Here is the riddle:

“You are in a paintball tournament.  Players who are ‘paint-balled’ are eliminated and must freeze where they are.  You enter a room. There are 34 people. You manage to paintball 30. How many people are in the room?”

As a math teacher who used to preach the importance of conditions in a problem, the problem grabbed me as a great example.  I was noticing how there could be several (correct) answers, depending on the conditions you adopted.  And how that would make a great ‘word problem’ discussion.
Posted solutions were ranging all the way from 0 to 35, some with interesting (and to me, valid) explanations.  Questions were posed, such as ‘are you one of the 34?’, ‘do people leave after they’re paintballed?’ and others.
This was exciting to me, as I would have loved for students to be asking those questions without fear.   I tried to briefly share some of that excitement/perspective.  I quickly realized that this classroom-related excitement was not shared, and it led to the accusation that I would debate the wetness of water.  Leave it to a math teacher to kill the fun?

The One Right Answer

It turns out that ‘The Right Answer’ was “One person. The room you entered had a window opening through which you paintballed your victims in another room, so you were alone in the room.”
Part of me appreciated the fun and ingenuity of that ‘answer’.   (I’d even finally decided that’s what was wanted.)  It was great for think-outside-the-box.   But, I also thought other folks’ options were OK, too, and would have encouraged those options in a class discussion.  But the above was The One Right Answer, and all else was Wrong. 
All this was no big deal.  It was all in fun, and these days ‘fun’ on Facebook is refreshing! 

The Aha! Reminder

But here’s the point for today:  How’d you feel when you read ‘The Answer’?  For me, I was suddenly struck with this overwhelming feeling: “Ah, yes. This is partly why many kids begin to hate math!! They’re always expecting a ‘trick’.”  They become convinced that math consists of rules/tricks that come out of the blue, that they can never possibly learn all this no-sense junk, and what’s the use anyway?
The irony? Younger students, say pre-k into early grades, typically love numbers, games with numbers, etc.  But as we try to move into learning to use numbers to help solve problems (arithmetic), and byond, it seems they begin to lose interest. 

               

Could that be our fault?  It’s likely.  The math education community has recognized this forever, and much impressive progress has been made here.   And, to be clear, I continue to love good Brain Teasers, both in and out of the classroom.  They can keep things fun and be instructive at the same time.
But, as we work to teach students to solve problems (math and otherwise), we continue to move away from “Here’s what you do. Do it” to “There’s more than The One Right Way, and often more than One Right Answer.  Here are some tools to help.”