That Is Not What I Meant

Ian Garrovillas attended my spring session in Oakland on integrating digital media into a math classroom and kinda missed the point. His take-away:

[Halloween] was Friday, a review and quiz day. Rather than merely putting up review questions on the board that our class could try and discuss, I interspersed screen shots of scary movies…



I let the image sit on the screen for a mere 3 or 4 seconds, acting as if I was unaware, before I moved onto the next slide. Got a few students with it. Lovely.

Okay, maybe that is pretty funny.

About 
I'm Dan and this is my blog. I'm a former high school math teacher and current head of teaching at Desmos. He / him. More here.

6 Comments

  1. I’ve found that I can shock and horrify my students without even using scary clips or photos…. but just by asking them to derive the Distance Formula from the Pythagorean Theorem!!

  2. That’s good stuff. Dan, I know you know this, but I’ll say it anyway. It’s just like math basketball. The basketball part is certainly not part of the curriculum, but if you can use it to keep interest up and have them vigorously bang out a bunch of problems, do it! The scary pictures will motivate the kids to do the problems just so they can see the next one.

    Of course, using the picture to ask how many degrees her head seems to be turned is more like it!

  3. Of course, using the picture to ask how many degrees her head seems to be turned is more like it!

    If I remember my scary movies correctly, her hair is just covering her face.

    The Exorcist is the head-spinny one.

  4. Yes, but just wait until the girl in this picture starts coming out of the projector screen, then you will really get the student’s attention! Maybe you can use CNN’s holographic technology!