So – as I anticipated, this problem was more challenging than the more typical direction where the number of people in the room is the given information. What completely knocked me out was that I saw two different diligent solution paths. One student convinced his neighbors that the formula to work with was x(x-1) where x is the number of people in the room. Nice thinking, not exactly right but a good start. Another group was diligently building a table of values. We plotted those values and it was pretty clear that a parabola was emerging. This was nice since the other formula was quadratic. However, the table of values did not match the formula. This led to a quick adjustment and we decided to solve the equation (1/2)(x)(x-1) = 253
I was told to multiply the 2 over to create x(x-1)= 506 and this is where class got exciting. The students, predictably, wanted to solve the quadratic. We had already concluded that we wanted numbers somewhere in the twenties based on the product. One of my students pointed out that we were looking at consecutive numbers whose product ends in a 6. The student patiently explained that it had to be 22 and 23 or 27 and 28. I LOVE this. The type of number sense at play here was so refreshing. First day of school a winner based on this exchange.
A Portrait of the Math Teacher as an Aging Man 