If you don't make mistakes, you aren't trying hard enough sometimes

I teach math to 6th graders at a middle school, and most of my kids have not yet met me. My favorite thing to do as a math teacher is to make mistakes in math for them to find and correct.<br><br>Today I made a mistake in the first minutes of class. I was so proud of myself. I wrote a problem on the board and wrote the answer as 7. The student I asked to read the problem out loud said, "Wait, uh, you forgot to carry the one." I was so proud of him on the first day of school, but I'm writing this because I just saw someone post that a kid is not to find math mistakes I make on purpose. I could not disagree with that more.<br><br>There are tons of simple math mistakes, especially mistakes in manufacturing simple math problems that I can use when giving instructions or data to the kids. With the right math mistakes, you don't have to say anything to the kids but try to help them solve the problem of why they can't make the math work. The whole time, I'm going through their work with them and asking questions of all kinds to help them build the critical thinking skills that will help them find the mistake, correct it, and get on with the math at hand.<br><br>In my algebra lessons, if I print out a problem set, I can easily create a mistake in 1 out of 10 problems, for example. I create a problem but intentionally change a single number in the problem. This means that when a student comes to me for help and asks me to show them how to solve the problem, I can walk them through, step by step, exactly how to create the right answer. I can use my own steps to guide the student to see where they went wrong. If that doesn't help, I can show them how to check their work (if that's not a traditional math concept anymore, I don't care, I still think it helps kids solve math problems).<br><br>I can create a word problem, or a series of word problems, that all rely on a single mistake, like incorrect conversion between two units of measurement that I can easily hide in a word problem that seems like it's just about fractions (another thing I'm going to keep using even if it's not in the curriculum).<br><br>So much of manufacturing math lessons these days seems to be all about manufacturing lessons that I can easily give to all four math classes at the same time (I also teach English, but math lessons are more susceptible to my favorite math trick). I quickly realized that it was not only more engaging for students to make mistakes, but I could use the same mistake across all four classes. <br><br>But it's worth repeating: I make my instruction lessons all wrong on purpose. I make mistakes so that kids will have to think deeper about the math. I don't know what kind of critical thinking you people are teaching otherwise, but if you do what I do, you have a personal, step by step path to show students exactly where they go wrong, and to help them find math mistakes and solve them.