And I am also tired of those responses as well (including the jeering, etc. of what we do with our time.) Unfortunately, al of this falls in deaf ears, including a retort of “all of us have the same time. It is what you spend yur time on that matters.”

Yeah, you gotta be careful of the trolls, I guess. There are holes in your theory and it’s not as simple of an answer as people want, but not only are the basics there, you admit that it won’t always work (to take the line with the least amount of people).

I also agree that it’s a problem we face in class all the time. I guess in the first week of class you could show some of those internet videos like “Will it blend?” or something and ask the students what is the purpose of that? Sure, the blender has a purpose, but it’s clearly not that. Someone is pushing the boundaries because it’s fun or cool.

That’s exactly what we do in math. Often the research is about pushing the boundaries for no other reason than it seems like a fun puzzle. For example, the 4 color theorem seems like a simple puzzle that ends up being complex and important in its results. Knot theory is another great example of current research being done in an area with easy to describe problems that seem useless but actually are relevant to daily life. Writing secret-codes for your friends is another. Number theory, topology, and abstract algebra offer quite a few examples of interesting puzzles (I think).

@whatsup
And what grade did you drop out in?

Congrats, too, on having it land in the NYTimes! Wow. If I were you, I’d be singing it from the rooftops ;-) I couldn’t believe it when I was reading the Sunday opinion section and saw your blog quoted. Very cool.

Dan, I get this reaction often as well, but never more than when I talk about Newton’s accomplishments and what he did sitting in a room by himself, doing experiments and scribbling in notebooks. The reaction is almost always of the “someone had some extra time on their hands!” variety. And I’m always baffled that response comes from a room full of students who want to study science in college and… become scientists. Weird that one of the greatest scientists of all time is, to them, a huge loser who had nothing better to do.

Would this reaction to Newton be the same if my story ended with Newton becoming the wealthiest man in history?

dwineman: You say “looks like somebody has too much time on their hands” but all I hear is “I’m sad because I don’t know what creativity feels like.”

I would have said “passion” instead of “creativity”

Cognitive surplus at its finest.

Great point and one I’ll chew on for a while.

At the same time I sense the “trolls” are suggesting in some respect that you’re putting in a great deal of effort for a minimal return. The more you create, the more I’m able, even with limited mathematical understanding, to value your efforts.

In a sense, it’s this new found ability to play with imagination and create that might be contributing to breaking down the barriers you see. Maybe not, but unless you can do some serious playing with challenging concepts, it’s hard to get your students not to freak out.

Didn’t you answer your own question, Dan? The kids are trolls: their automatic defensive small-mindedness is purely a posture against the sight of someone being passionate and successful. As dwineman says, they haven’t experienced passion and success themselves. And, of course, the teenage years are spent being terrified of being turned on your peers — much easier to pre-emptively identify the adult, or the moviemaker, or someone ELSE as the target.

So don’t go looking for a verbal counter as one doesn’t exist. Responding just feeds the troll. Instead, offer them the chance to experience that passion first-hand. The harder the battle of a WCYDWT lesson, the greater the “I did it!” feeling of success when they finally get to the right answer. (Kathy Sierra calls this the “I rock!” moment)

From your descriptions of how a WCYDWT session goes, it sounds like the class becomes passionate and they really put themselves into the mathematical investigation. That’s a visceral riposte to “too much time on his hands”. How’s your neutral disaffected too-bored-for-school attitude now, Mr Just Yelled “Only The Rims Of The Cups Count!” Across The Room?

Dan,

I’m not a teacher so I might well be saying something either (a) foolish or (b) horribly obvious but…

Give the kids a project to do! (?)

When someone says “someone has too much time on their hands” in a context like that I hear them saying “that’s kind of cool, what you just showed me, but if I admit to that I have to recognize that I’m never going to accomplish anything even close to that cool and neither or any of my friends because we all suck and life around here sucks and the only examples we see of people who sorta kinda succeed around here are the ones who cynically embrace that suckiness and adopt a mean, self-centered, lazy, greedy attitude”.

In some ways, showing them videos might even make that worse. It’s very passive. It’s stuff “other people” – remote people – do. They can’t imagine themselves in or making that video. You still have them in the role of consumers, not makers.

I don’t know what a good project would be for your circumstance but… something.

-t

If anyone is rude enough to tell me I have too much time on my hands (and hey, I have said it to other people in jest) my answer is “Whose fucking time is it, anyway?”.

Where does anyone get off trying to tell someone how to spend their time? It’s bad enough that we have advertisers incessantly telling us how to spend our money (on their products, naturally). The criticism implies a value judgment that the critics are ill-qualified to make.

If the conversation happens in real life, I ask the person what they suggest I do instead. I listen to their ideas and compare them to my pastimes, based on my values (like creativity, intellectual stimulation, fun, community building).

If I feel contrary, I just tell them I don’t watch TV, and look smug. People who say things like that typically watch a lot of TV.

Pretty hard to be passionate in high school, when the adults are bossing you around, and passion might mean rebellion that would get you in big trouble. If you have a passion for your own freedom, how do you follow that without maybe “wrecking your life” (according to your parents)? Seems to me this would be a big factor in the passionate=foolish equation they espouse.

I think your frustration with “clever retorts” may be a partial indication of why the answer to the passion problem is eluding you. (I’m teasing a bit, but at bottom I’m quite serious about this.)

You have a brilliant mind, Dan, and one of the things I’ve noticed about brilliant minds is that they subject themselves to the most intense standards of excellence possible– often far beyond those they impose upon their peers. As a result, however, the relentless search for a sense of competence– How can *I* solve this problem? What can *I* say to students to cut through their solopsism? etc– can obscure the fact that when dealing with other human beings, the answers to questions about them have much less to do with your reality, than with *theirs*.

So your frustrated response to your positive commenters is telling, I think. They’re not intelligent people who wish to support you and mean you well (their reality), but simply “enablers,” because you perceive their answers to be useless to you (your reality).

Similarly, a tweet which can be used to cut a disdainful teen down to size appeals because it’s a righteous, five second response which allows you to continue your math lesson. This allows you to overlook not only the fact that it doesn’t answer your ultimate question, but that it is also, frankly, a pretty demeaning thing to say to a kid, even if it is true (and I’m not convinced it is).

Anyway, I don’t mean to make any sweeping or vengeful judgements here about your capacity for compassion– not at all. You wouldn’t even be asking these things if you didn’t care about other people. I mean only to say that in messy, wonderful, heart-of-teaching questions like “Why are my kids afraid of passion?”, the answer isn’t going to come from analytical concision, or from the perfect pithy remark. It’s going to come from the long, equally messy, often contradictory, and multi-facted process of knowing your kids.

So ask them. Observe them. Who *actually* makes the passion-dismissive comments? Who merely agrees with a nod of the head? Who doesn’t agree but stays silent? When? Under what circumstances? Why? And then, why again? And why?

In otherwords…you have to be patient with irresolution.

Well done, Dan. The real world is full of math – it takes a creative teacher to help kids realize this!

Hey Dan, I too found you from Apartment Therapy. Your blog speaks to me, not on a mathy level, but on a teaching level. I teach 12th grade comp and lit and I get, all the time, but THIS IS SOOOO BORING.

I have found that I say Boring is another way of saying, “I don’t get it and since I don’t get it, I don’t have any patience for why you are stoked about it.”

I love talking about how people write about issues like disease vectors including zombies or vampires or why handwashing matters or even about why Goneril really wasn’t trying to stab King Lear in the back.

I think your passion (and I’d like to hope mine) serves as an inspiration to your students. What’s true is that what WE are excited in and passionate about is what we teach best.