dy/dan

A supercut of moments in cinema and television where characters hate on math.

In fairness, people hate math. Hollywood just turns on the cameras.

BTW. Here's the behind-the-scenes. I went to SubZin, searched for "math," crossed off the (few) movies that had anything positive or neutral to say on the subject, queued up all the other movies in NetFlix and ripped those scenes over the course of a few months. Then I wrote down all the lines and started moving them around like an essay. The supercut was easier to edit knowing I had some large passages where kids talked about flunking math or adults referred to their own trouble with math. I was also able to make the movies talk to each other, like the dialog between Jamie Lee Curtis and Megan Fox.

Avery Pickford's Truly Group Project:

So our crazy new idea? We've put together four open ended, challenging probability games. Eight groups of 3 or 4 will spend tomorrow working on one of these games (2 groups for each game in each class). On Tuesday, groups will rotate and work on a different game, starting where the previous group left off.

Mr. Owen's amazing work with ActivePrompt:

Since that was too easy, I next told them to create two more parallel lines that were neither vertical nor horizontal. They pretty quickly realized that it was all about slope. Their idea was to assign everyone a number and then have them go up and over by that amount (1,1) (2,2) (3,3). The real genius idea (only one class did it this way) was to translate that first line up using the rule (x , y) –> (x , y+1).

I originally figured the "create two parallel lines" ActivePrompt to be a great team building activity and little more. Mr. Owen's class completely surprised me. Must read.

Kyle Pearce's Detention Buy-Out:

In the video, three administrators from Tecumseh Vista Academy K-12 School are interviewed and propose individual options for students to avoid serving detentions by paying the administrators according to their buy-out offers.

Julie Reulbach's Barbie Bungee jump:

There is nothing more exciting then seeing seeing if your Barbie is going to come crashing to the ground. The students learned so much and we ALL had a blast!

Watch the clip. Get excited about how excited kids are to see the results of their calculations verified outside of the textbook's answer key.

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Andy:

My Algebra class worked on the detention buy out problem today, and they loved it. The discussions were great, and the students did not even realize they were using Algebra.

a/k/a Dave Majors Rides Again

It turned out to be productive and fun arguing over who among the four contestants in this video did the best job drawing a square. Video served us well. It gave us something to look at, argue about, and abstract. But video is still a static medium in many ways. The pictures are moving but it doesn't edit well. It doesn't personalize. It doesn't reflect the learner in any way.

So Dave Majors and I partnered up again to kick around an idea of what this task would look like in code, in a web browser, and came up with better best squares.

He's written a post describing some of his technical innovations. I'm going to use this space to point out our pedagogical innovations.

1. The most obvious difference here is that instead of watching four people attempt to draw a square, you get to attempt to draw a square yourself.
   
2. That quadrilateral then follows you throughout the text. Rather than using a generic example to illustrate a mathematical concept, we use the example you created. We talk about its perimeter. We talk about its area. The diagrams in the margins change. The text in the textbook changes.
   
3. You see your classmates' quadrilaterals and make an intuitive ranking of their square-ness. When we formalize the concept of square-ness later, we'll refer back to our initial rankings. Ideally, the mathematics will validate the student's intuition and vice versa.
   
4. You can revise and skip most questions. We're deviating here from our last experiment where each question had to be completed before you could move on. In a print textbook, you can always flip forward and see what's next or move onto a new task if you don't want to complete the current one. So you can leave an answer blank. You can go back and revise your answers. The textbook doesn't judge you. It doesn't say, "You're wrong." It reports your response (or non-response) to your teacher and lets your teacher make the pedagogical judgement there.
5. The teacher's edition is so useful. I asked Dave to let me see all responses disaggregated a) by student and b) by question. I want to click on Mike's name and see all his progress throughout this unit — everything he drew, everything he wrote. Then I want to click on each question and see every response. Dave went above and beyond here. You see every student response but you also see the revision history on those responses. You can trace the student's thinking. You can also flag student responses to show the class. I'm such a fan of Dave's work here.
   
6. Don't like our definition of "best square" as being the ratio of areas? Submit your own. The system will accept your formula, send it to the teacher, and then use it to rank the entire class' quadrilaterals.
   

Dave and I both agreed this problem is a little too obscure and weird to justify all the effort we put into it. But critique the digital pedagogies rather than the task itself. These pedagogies can transfer to other, better tasks. Critique this definition of personalized learning.

Previously. Dave Major Shows You The Future Of Math Textbooks.

Here are five quotes, some of which are from edtech startups in 2012 while others are from an advertorial for "Individually Prescribed Instruction" published in ASCD in 1972. Can you tell them apart?

#1

Educators and parents across the country seem to agree that a system of individualized instruction is much needed in our schools today. This has been evident to any parent who has raised more than one child and to every teacher who has stood in front of a class.

#2

[This product] allows the teacher to monitor the child's progress but more important it allows each child to monitor his own behavior in a particular subject.

#3

The objectives of the system are to permit student mastery of instructional content at individual learning rates and ensure active student involvement in the learning process.

#4

This is a step towards the superior classroom, because the system includes material that can be used independently, allowing each child to learn at his own rate and realize success.

#5

The technology, training program, and management technique give the teacher tools for assessment, mastery measurement, and specified management techniques.

Okay, they're all from 1972, from a piece called "Do Schools Need IPI? Yes!" [pdf]. But really the only line that's obviously out of the past is:

The aide's most important functions is the scoring, recording, and filing of students' test and skill sheets.

Computers now handle that scoring, recording, and filing. But in every other way, you could have ripped the text of that article from a Techcrunch article or New Schools prospectus.

I'm not merely snarking that what we think is new and great isn't so new. I'm also saying it still isn't great. Stanley Erlwanger wrote an incredible piece in 1973 illustrating how easy it was for a student named Benny to appear successful in IPI while actually knowing very little. Both in 1972 and in 2012, these systems ask questions that are trivial enough to be gamed. The only difference is that instead of writing questions to accommodate the limitations of a human-scorer, we're now writing questions to accommodate the limitations of a machine-scorer.

If you're in this industry, read those papers close enough that you can tell yourself, "I understand why IPI failed. This is how we're different." Basically, IPI is a free failure for you and your company. I hope you won't pass it up.

BTW. Justin Reich points me to the opposing piece from the same ASCD issue:

While some persons see the IPI program as aimed in the direction of "humanness and openness," I consider its implementation a step in the opposite direction for many schools. For more than 50 years, many recognized leaders in education have worked to move learning opportunities provided in our schools from "rigid, passive, rote, and narrow" to "open and humane."

2013 Jan 12. Mike Caulfield again points out that personalized learning may have an isolating effect on students who really need to have their assumptions tested by their peers:

Benny, the student the study is about, has some odd ideas about mathematics, induced by peculiarities of the testing system. But he’ll never know they are odd because the individualized instruction makes discussion with peers impossible.

2013 Jan 13. Mary had a positive experience with IPI and highlights the efforts her teacher took to keep the program from isolating students with their misconceptions:

I was educated using IPI from K-4. IPI allowed me to work at my own pace, which tended to be faster than average in Math and about average in the reading. When I moved to a district that did not use it, I was devastated. I hated the non-IPI system and was bored and annoyed with math for the next three years. Since This was so devastating to me, I clung to my IPI materials and I still have some all these years later. I use them and my experiences to balance the discussion we have in my graduate class when we discuss the Benny Paper. You see, to me, IPI was not a failure, the way Benny’s teacher implemented it was. Teachers still had to teach when using IPI or of course it would be a failure. My experience with IPI was different in key ways than The Benny paper describes… the teachers would set up table groups each week based upon what book we were working on. Along with working independently through the workbook and tests, the students were required to discuss a question provided by the teacher and s/he would ask each group to stop and discuss it at a particular time so s/he could be there to listen in. In addition to this, after each unit test, we had a brief one-on-one meeting with the teacher to discuss the content, where according to my old handwriting, I was being asked targeted questions where I needed to explain my reasoning. In other words, my teachers did their own assessments and did not rely on bubble sheets. True the initial presentation of the material came through the workbook, and it’s true such a system would not engage all students all the time, but that’s where teachers come in. Teachers need to know their students. Teachers need flexibility day by day, student by student, to use or not use these tools. Allowing students to move through material at their own pace is still a good goal. Giving teachers tools to help them manage that is a good goal. Devising tools that remove teachers from the process is where we go wrong.

Rocketship CEO John Danner went on record with EdSurge. The Learning Labs aren't leaving.

Online learning is integral to our model…The Learning Lab is not going away, rather we are working to integrate its key components directly into our classrooms under the guidance of our incredible teachers and staff…I think Merrow probably just happened to focus on an isolated incident and wanted to bring it up as it is always a valid concern with online learning. We continue to work on the data integration piece and this pilot doesn't change the importance of that. Our teachers continue to get more robust data from the Learning Lab and are eager for us to work towards a fully integrated and real-time system.

Jason Dyer notes that this doesn't really address NewsHour's criticism:

Is the complaint from the PBS interview really about “teacher interface” or even “data”?

Meanwhile, on his blog, Danner writes a post called "Kids learn when they are solving problems," in which he laments the state of online learning and basically outs himself as a radical constructivist.

When you are in a school, I think it becomes very clear when learning happens. Students who are working on a problem that they can solve learn by trying to solve the problem and receiving prompts and insights from peers or the teacher when they make mistakes. This eventually helps them get over the hump and be able to solve similar problems with a lot less mental effort. That's learning. This happens thousands of times a day in well run classrooms. For whatever reason, we have really lost this truth in online learning.

All of this makes Danner, and Rocketship, really hard to pin down. But there's a lot to like here and even more that's interesting.