I highly recommend you read Anna Blinstein’s account of a math problem that went wrong in one class and right in another. The makeover she applied between classes is available to you no matter what classes or students you teach.

Before

Blinstein notes that “the sheer wordiness and immediate jumping into very abstract ideas was a huge turn-off for many students.”

After

She describes the makeover as asking students “to try things, engage, take guesses, get a foot in the door, and progress towards increasing abstraction and formality at their own pace.”

Blinstein also notes that she “started with a story.” This is significant! Cognitive scientist Daniel Willingham describes “the privileged status of story.” Stories are often more interesting to people than expository texts and students often learn more from them.

Blinstein’s story:

It’s my birthday, but I’m really, really obsessed with all things square. My entire party has a square theme. Of course, I demand a square cake and that all pieces served to guests are perfect squares too.

Of course this isn’t real. No one, not even the spoiled princesses on My Super Sweet 16, has ever asked for such a party. But none of her students cares about that for the same reason that no one cares that the universe of Harry Potter isn’t real:

Blinstein’s students aren’t just reading a story. She’s made them a part of the story.

Crucial to Blinstein’s success here, in my view, is that she has deleted elements of the problem so that she could re-introduce them with her students’ participation. (Also that she has developed an enormous professional community online she could ask for help between classes.)

Her story deepens my conviction that the most productive and interesting problems aren’t assigned on paper, but co-developed by teachers and students in conversation with one another.

Featured Tweet

Love it! Amazing what a difference a story context makes. #lhcsd https://t.co/cysd5n3LS8

— Teresa Lee (@Mrs_TeresaLee) April 10, 2017

Agreed, but it’s interesting to me how few “story problems” contain any of the elements of stories that people enjoy: heroism, conflicts, rising action, resolution, etc.

Here is the oldest kind of math problem that exists:

Some of you knew what kind of problem this was before you had finished the first sentence. You could blur your eyes and without reading the words you saw that there were two unknown quantities and two facts about them and you knew this was a problem about solving a system of equations.

Whoever wrote this problem knows that students struggle to learn how to solve systems and struggle to remain awake while solving systems. I presume that’s why they added a context to the system and it’s why they scaffolded the problem all the way to the finish line.

How could we improve this problem — and other problems like this problem?

I asked that question on Twitter and I received responses from, roughly speaking, two camps.

One group recommended we change the adjectives and nouns. That we make the problem more real or more relevant by changing the objects in the problem. For example, instead of analyzing an animated movie, we could first survey our classes for the movie genres they like most and use those in the problem.

This makeover is common, in my experience. I don’t doubt it’s effective for some students, particularly those students already adept at the formal, operational work of solving a system of equations through elimination. The work is already easy for those students, so they’re happy to see a more familiar context. But I question how much that strategy interests students who aren’t already adept at that work.

Another strategy is to ignore the adjectives and nouns and change the verbs, to change the work students do, to ask students to do informal, relational work first, and use it as a resource for the formal, operational work later.

This makeover is hard, in my experience. It’s especially hard if you long ago became adept at the formal, operational work of solving a system of equations through elimination. This makeover requires asking yourself, “What is the core concept here and what are early ways of understanding it?”

No adjectives or nouns were harmed during this makeover. Only verbs.

The theater you run charges $4 for child tickets and $12 for adult tickets.

1. What’s a large amount of money you could make?
2. What’s a small amount of money you could make?
3. Okay, your no-good kid brother is working the cash register. He told you he made:
   • $2,550 on Friday
   • $2,126 on Saturday
   • $1,968 on Sunday

   He’s lying about at least one of those. Which ones? How do you know?

This makeover claims that the core concept of systems is that they’re about relationships between quantities. Sometimes we know so many relationships between those quantities that they’re only satisfied and solved by one set of those quantities. Other times, lots of sets solve those relationships and other times those relationships are so constrained that they’re never solved.

So we’ve deleted one of the relationships here. Then we’ve ask students to find solutions to the remaining relationship by asking them for a small and large amount of money. There are lots of possible solutions. Then we’ve asked students to encounter the fact that not every amount of money can be a solution to the relationship. (See: Kristin Gray, Kevin Hall, and Julie Reulbach for more on this approach.)

From there, I’m inclined to take Sunday’s sum (one he wasn’t lying about) and ask students how they know it might be legitimate. They’ll offer different pairs of child and adult tickets. “My no-good kid brother says he sold 342 tickets. Can you tell me if that’s possible?”

Slowly they’ll systematize their guessing-and-checking. It might be appropriate here to visualize their guessing-and-checking on a graph, and later to help students understand how they could have used algebraic notation to form that visualization quickly, at which point the relationships start to make even more sense.

If we only understand math as formal, operational work, then our only hope for helping a student learn that work is lots and lots of scaffolding and our only hope for helping her remain awake through that work is a desperate search for a context that will send a strong enough jolt of familiarity through her cerebral cortex.

That path is wide. The narrow path asks us to understand that formal, operational ideas exists first as informal, relational ideas in the mind of the student, that our job is devise experiences that help students access those ideas and build on them.

BTW. Shout out to Marian Small and other elementary educators for helping me see the value in questions that ask about “big” and “small” answers. The question is purposefully imprecise and invites students to start poking at the edges of the relationship.

Previously

Makeover Preview: Marine Ramp

The Task

The British Columbia Institute of Technology explains the origin of this task in their Building Better Math project:

Many high school students are avoiding math and cutting off pathways to exciting technical careers before they even know about them.

Their solution? More real world problems. Specifically, job world problems, problems that relate to “areas of geosciences, health care, engineering, renewable resources, oceanography, forensics, architecture and other industries.”

The BCIT has a very shiny coin here. They know better than anybody else — better than most teachers and curriculum developers, certainly — where our mathematical models are useful. I was blind to the mathematical modeling essential to the construction of a ramp at a boat dock, for example. BCIT helped me see it.

The BCIT knows that “trigonometry lives at the boat dock!” but without very careful curriculum development and very careful enactment by teachers, students will only experience the opportunity to calculate at the boat dock! This context offers many other opportunities to think mathematically besides calculation.

Here is one way to exploit them.

Show your students this video.

I begin so many of my applied tasks with video not because “kids love their YouTubes” but because multimedia allows me to de-mathematize a context that has already been heavily mathematized, leaving information, formulas, and other scaffolds to be revealed at an appropriate moment, and involve students in that process.

Ask your students, “What’s wrong with this scenario?”

A: Without a ramp from pier to dock we can’t get on the boat.

Then ask students, “Which of these four ramps is best? Which is worst? Why?”

A: The shortest one is lousy because it’s too steep to safely cross. The longest one is lousy because, while it’s safe enough to cross, it’s longer than it needs to be, which is wasteful. The best is probably one of the other two and there may be one that’s even better.

This is an important moment for student learning and for student interest.

Learning. There are cognitive gains to be had by showing students contrasting cases of the same question and asking them to invent a measure to describe them. Here is an example from Schwartz and Martin (2004).

One group attempted to invent a measure and another group simply received instruction on the canonical measure. (“Variance” in this case.) Both groups then saw a worked example, after which the “invention” group outperformed the “tell-and-practice” group on a battery of measures. The invention activity helped students transfer in knowledge that prepared them to learn from explicit instruction later.

These multiple contrasting cases also allow me to ask students, “What measurements stay the same in every case? What measurements change?” That sets us up to assign variables to the changing measurements and quantities to the fixed measurements. The original problem offers only one case — one single ramp — offering us none of those cognitive gains.

Interest. As I summarized earlier, Sung-Il Kim’s research predicts that students will find this makeover more interesting than the original. Rather than explicitly stating the question and all of its relevant information, we’ve shown something incongruous and stated just enough that students will have to make the inferences that drive interest.

We should mathematize the context further now, assigning quantities to the measurements we know. (The distance the boat dock drops and the distance from the dock to the pier.) We should tell students the crucial constraint that the ramp can’t be any steeper than 18° as it meets the dock. We should model for students how a mathematician takes a context full of useless noise (eg. the color of the water, the shape of the hills) and draws a new version that includes only the useful details.

The problem is now where we started, fully mathematized. The goal of our previous work was to expand student access to the mathematics and also broaden that mathematics to include more verbs than just “calculate.”

Let’s not stop there. Let’s head to Chris Lusto’s Boat Dock Generator (source code).

This allows us to extend the existing problem. Hit the refresh button and get a new boat dock. Another one. And another one. Can students turn their one correct answer into a method for quickly calculating the best ramp length for any boat dock? Can they write it in algebraic language?

Concluding Remarks

I realize the new problem is more difficult to implement than the old. This new problem requires the teacher to involve herself in the posing of the problem and not just the assignment of the problem. It’s relatively easy to say to students, “Head over to this link and do the problem. I’ll be around to help if you need it.” It’s rather more difficult to embed yourself in that problem, to see yourself as an agent in the posing of that problem and the development of its question, even if the upside is better learning and more interest. This makeover is high reward at a high cost. At the moment, the reward interests me more than the cost.

You can download the problem at 101questions, but my main intent here wasn’t to create a problem we could use in the classroom. The point of a math problem isn’t just to get an answer, it’s to learn about math. And in the same way, the point of a math problem makeover isn’t just to get a better math problem, it’s to learn about learning.

What You Recommended

Dawn Burgess:

I have also been rolling this same problem in my head, but I didn’t know about the Vancouver version. I teach on an island in Maine, where the tide swings are larger, and these kinds of contraptions are everywhere. I’ve thought about making a three-act type problem, but can’t wrap my head around the best application. I was thinking of doing it for more advanced trig in precalculus: Here’s the ramp, here’s the dock, and for what portion of the day will the ramp be usable? For walking up and down? For hauling a hand-truck? For a wheel-chair? How could you change it to make it usable for more of the day? How might the harbormaster foil your plans? This is a great problem for my context, because many of my less mathy students know more about harbor restrictions and practical “dockery” than I do.

Justin Brennan offers a word of caution about these job-world applications:

After spending 8 years as an engineer prior to teaching, I always felt that I’d include all kinds of stuff from my engineering life into teaching. However, now that I am slightly wiser and more humbled, that stuff is too specialized, only interesting to me and maybe 2 other kids on a good day.

I appreciate Justin’s testimony that “math + jobs = fun!” is too simple an equation. But rather than give up the “jobs” part altogether, I have attempted here to bring students into the job in a particular way. Not all job math problems are created equal, in other words.

Jonathan Newman made a simulator in Desmos. My concern with every simulator is that the person who made the simulator uses more math than the students do. Scaffolding questions around the simulator to simulate mathematical thought, as Jonathan does, is no small task.

I have been rolling the same math problem around in my head for the last two months. Here is a link and a PDF.

“Obsessed” wouldn’t be too sharp a description. Not with the math, which isn’t more advanced than high school trigonometry. Rather with the problem itself, and the opportunities it offers students to think mathematically.

In its current form, those opportunities are limited. In its current form, the problem asks students to read given information (and a lot of it), recall a formula, and calculate the result. That’s important mathematical thinking but hardly the most important kind of mathematical thinking (a statement of opinion) and not the only kind of mathematical thinking the context offers us (a statement of fact). There are more mathematical opportunities, and more interesting ones, than the problem offers in its current form.

So change that! How would you makeover this problem and help students experience all those interesting opportunities to learn mathematics?

On Monday, I’ll offer my own thoughts, along with a collaboration with Chris Lusto.