dy/dan

An embarrassment of riches this week. It was difficult keeping this to five:

• Too good to be true, Scott Keltner. So is it … free … then? I give this image strong odds on provoking a class debate and highlighting some of your students' misconceptions of percent growth.
• Car Chase, Ryan Brown. The current darling of 101questions. (12 questions, no skips, as of this writing.) Notice how the first car smacks into the second, which was hidden off-screen. That's stylish camera work!
• Muggsy Bogues, Tony Gumbo. The question, "How much shorter is Muggsy Bogues?" is one thing. "How many different ways can you express that difference?" is another. (eg. Absolute v. relative.) Start with the first. End with the second.
• First day of school, John Golden. "Is your height linear?" It's a striking visual and the units along the "x-axis" are identical so you have a rare moment to examine the growth of height over time using people in photographs rather than points on a graph.
• Plinko, Michael Pershan. Yeah, great cut at the end there. Where's the wisdom in putting the biggest pay-out beneath the most likely bucket? Bowen? (Related: this image, taken from this video.)

Other notes:

• Counting is so last winter. You'll notice that your first ten responses will generally come from the same ten-or-so people who have seen everything uploaded to 101questions and keep current on all new uploads. It's interesting to watch their tastes change. For instance, counting lots of little things used to be a lot of fun for this crowd, but now, as Tony Gumbo's Bryant Denny Stadium can attest, counting is out. (Which isn't to say that rating won't pick up once more casual users check in, just that the obsessives have made their decision about counting.)
• Speaking of obsessives, Andrew Stadel has written a great tutorial for getting the most out of 101questions.
• Veggie Juice swings for the fences. You decide where it lands.
• Closing. Timon Piccini's Cab Ride is the first first act to "close," which means 100 people responded to it. Now it goes to the very bottom of the pile on the homepage, where it'll only be seen once people have seen everything else. Initially, I thought first acts would close in a matter of hours after being uploaded. That was naive. It took months.

Plus my own listing:

• Edmonton Water Consumption, uploaded on a dare from Sean Geraghty. My assumption is it's going to get clobbered.

Daniel Schneider:

I thought I’d still be the only one reading it these days. I’ve only recently started telling friends and colleagues about this site, which means most of those 10,000 are from people I’ve never met. I’m surprised by how many people have found me and I’m glad people find my ideas meaningful. I guess I’m just amazed at how easy it’s been to have a voice in the semi-anonymity of the internet.

If you're just getting into teaching, there are plenty of worse ways to invest your time than in blogging, tweeting, and building your own faculty lounge.

2012 May 10. On account of her stellar blogging, Kate Nowak receives unsolicited e-mails from administrators looking to hire her.

So, you know. For the past long while it seemed like admins and hiring-decision types paid no mind to my blogging. But that's changing. People are paying attention, and more importantly, it's people who value the same things we do: continuous learning, reflective practice, learning out loud. I was asked about specific posts on f(t) in the interview for my new job, which not only helped them get to know me, but heightened my opinion of them and their school as a promising place to work.

That Kate Nowak:

I don’t have a blog, because I have nothing original to contribute.

Shawn Cornally coins the term FeedThresh (short for "Feedback Threshold") and gives it a definition that feels exactly right:

1. The student knows that first attempts are rarely perfect, and often require serious revising.
2. The student wants expert feedback on work that is established and based on research and the literature.
3. The student knows that his learning is not tied to class time or any other arbitrary unit of time or space.

Assessment is too complicated for any of us to do any more than say, "We're trying to optimize for a certain set of values," and then make those values explicit. Standards-based grading involves some compromise, but I don't know of another assessment strategy that optimizes the values that Shawn's made so explicit here.

Matt Vaudrey takes an assist from Timon Piccini with a high-caliber lesson on the math of mullets. The money graf:

Students fit the pipe cleaner along the hair, then straightened it onto their rulers to find the measurement of the Party. The Business was usually pretty straight.

Great moves here:

1. He begins the experience with intuition, the lowest rung on the ladder of abstraction, asking students to decide using nothing more than their gut "which one is more mullet-y?" By the end, they've named variables and defined operations, fully abstracting the context. Math has given a language to their intuition.
2. He asks the students to generalize the ratio to their own haircuts, in addition to several other higher-level extension questions. You're looking at an activity with a low bar for entry and a high bar for exit right here.
3. He cut his own hair into a mullet for the occasion. That's commitment, and gross.

Here is a picture of a fountain from Pearson's Common Core Geometry iBook. (Full disclosure: I consult with Pearson.)

Given ten tries, you'd never guess the question connected to that image: "What is the measure of the arc of the circular basin of the fountain that will be in the photograph?"

Same with this line from problem 23 on page 351:

Campers often use a "bear bag" at night to avoid attracting animals to their food supply.

It is followed by:

Are angle one and the given angle alternate interior angles, same-side interior angles or corresponding angles?

Not only will those questions fail to interest many of my students but they're also unnatural and disconnected from the context to which they are attached. The fountain doesn't want that question. The bear bag has no use for its question. Students notice that disconnect. Some have fully internalized that disconnect and concluded that math is some alien, otherworldly thing they'll survive and then forget as quickly as possible.

What Do We Do?

Not this:

Over at Dan’s site people have been discussing these last set of questions and we find, naturally, Dan promoting his brand of “Make the prompt scream the question you are looking for” …

I hear it too often in emails, tweets, and conversations after conference sessions:

"I asked them what questions they had and they asked the one I was looking for!"

Just ask it.

"It took some time but I prompted them a little and they asked the question I wanted them to focus on!"

Just ask it.

"They guessed the question I wanted them to ask!"

Just ask it.

Just ask the question. My point has never been that you should never ask questions rather that you should ask questions with some certainty they will be interesting and seem natural to your students.

How can you tell in advance that a question will be interesting or seem natural to your students? Ideally, I'd have a room full of students I could run ideas past — an on-call focus group. I'd punch a button and they'd snap to attention. Then I'd introduce a context and a question and they'd give me a thumbs up or down. (Standard disclaimer: math is a context.) Maybe they'd suggest other, more interesting questions. That would be great — all of it — but I don't have those students on call. I have you guys instead, and that's way, way better than nothing.

But just because the football player runs through tires on the scrimmage field doesn't mean he runs through tires on game day. See? 101questions is our scrimmage field. It isn't the game itself.

BTW: Avery Pickford has some smart writing along these same lines.

Previously: Unnatural Currents