ABSTRACT
The lesson segment discussed in this chapter, which comes from a well known lesson on even and odd numbers taught by Deborah Ball, moves down a few grade levels and moves up a few levels of complexity. The bulk of the “action” in the lesson seems to come from students, so the role of the teacher is much less obvious than in the lessons analyzed in Chapters 4 and 5. In addition, at least one decision made by Ball is controversial: various people have called it “a mistake” and said that it seems “random.” This is about as challenging a lesson to analyze as can be found.
