I spent a wonderful week on Long Beach Island with my family relaxing and enjoying the waves. It made me think deeply about the effects of the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico and the news reports of the large balls of tar that were showing up on some beaches in Texas. So sad – all of the time that was going by while BP employees tried to trouble shoot and problem solve. Now, I don’t claim to fully understand what went wrong and what they were trying to do to solve it, but it definitely wasn’t something that was an easy fix – that’s for sure. Talking to an administrator at my school this morning about the course evaluations for our geometry class last year helped me make the connection between the BP problem and PBL.

This made me think to myself – I sure hope they had some creative problem solvers working for BP, potentially some people who had had an education that had taught them somewhere along the lines how to think creatively, analytically and had given them some problems that they hadn’t seen before. Clearly, just practicing the same problems over and over again wasn’t going to help these engineers and team leaders come up with a solution to making that leak stop. Giving them homework where they had to just repeat what the teacher did in class each night wasn’t going to allow them to think about what they were able to do in a situation where no one else could think of an answer. Somewhere in their learning they needed to be able to practice the art of looking at a problem that they couldn’t solve and asking themselves what do I know from the past, how can I apply it to this current problem, what resources do I have to solve it now, how can I get others to communicate with me to work together and what can I learn from this situation?

Interestingly, many of the responses on our course evaluations stated that students, even though they enjoyed the course, still craved direct instruction. I am not surprised because of the habits of mind that have been embedded in our students in the U.S. and their beliefs about success in academia. It is important however, to continue to make students feel comfortable enough by summarizing topics, questioing students who make unclear statement and making sure there is clarity at the end of a discussion. Creating environments where students feel comfortable to see uncertainty as permissible in learning mathematics and problem solving is extremely important. The more we accept this in the classroom on a regular basis, the better our students will become at seeing problems openly and patiently and before we know it, they will become better at open-ended problems and problems they have not seen before. Perhaps in turn this will improve the professionals out there who are solving todays problems, and hopefully the next time a crisis happens it won’t take 52 days to come up with something to make it stop.