The Passion of the WCYDWT or: Mistakes I Have Made, and Vindication by the Neuroscience of Curiosity

Also: The Parable of Captain Joseph “Cannonballs” Kittinger

I had one of the greatest compliments I’ve ever had a couple weeks ago. As I have mentioned previously, Teach for America holds their summer training at my school, so they teach most of our classes of summer school, and I’ve done some mentoring of the new teachers  this summer. I really saw a lot of them struggle with getting students engaged in the lesson, so I convinced the leadership to let me do a short presentation about WCYDWT for them, where I hyped that and the use of blogs- nothing you haven’t seen Dan Meyer talk about or write about already, just a bit more crass and sarcastic. Then, I sat in on a panel for all of the new teachers, and they were asking questions. The first question directed at me was: “Every time I walk past your classroom, I see your students smiling and really engaged. How do you do that?”

First, a confession: this isn’t true. Most days, my class is a snooze-fest. Really. As I said in the last post, I was pretty lucky this summer in that I had a small number of kids in my class, and all of them were really invested and were there by their own choice. It wasn’t anything I’ve done necessarily.

Secondly: I should always put this caveat in here, but please don’t consider me an expert on teaching, or think that I think I’m so awesome. I think I have some good ideas, but many days I suck. Plus, I do a bunch of things that I would not recommend. For instance, threatening that gnomes will stab you with a rusty harpoon if you divide by zero: NOT recommended for new teachers.

Anyways… my answer was that I felt that I had a lot of passion for my subject area. Every day, no matter what I was teaching, I pitched it like it was the coolest thing that there ever was. It became a joke with my classes, where every day I would say stuff like, “prepare to have your minds blown, it’s logarithm time” or, “hold onto your pants, calculating standard deviations is going to be awesome,” or, “I hope that you brought back-up underwear today, because you are going to wet yourself with excitement about GRAPHING TRIGONOMETRIC FUNCTIONS!”

I do think that passion is a really important part of what we do. If you are not passionate about math, or whatever it is that you teach, it’s going to be really hard for your students to see the benefit of paying attention. I really try hard to convey the beauty of math every single day. If I take 17 different approaches, I will keep getting the same answer. It always works! After I told some stories about Archimedes, whenever students discover something, I make them run up and down the hallway yelling “Eureka!” When we can pose a question, then find a solution to that question using mathematics, that is amazing.

After thinking about it, though, I’ve decided that passion is not enough. Necessary but not sufficient, for you logicians. Here is one lesson that I did in the fall that, even though I was THE MOST PASSIONATE I HAVE EVER BEEN!!!, it just totally bombed.

If you have been keeping up with the Red Bull Stratos Jump (Rhett Allain at Dot Physics has put up some pretty awesome stuff about it), then hopefully you have heard the story of Joe Kittinger. I’m secretly upset that he has been in the news lately, because it was always one of my favorite stories to talk about, my badass trump card.  If you aren’t familiar, here it is in a nutshell:

Joe Kittinger, referred to (lovingly) as “Cannonballs Kittinger” by me for pretty obvious reasons, jumped out of a hot-air balloon from almost 103,000 feet in the air, with a leaky suit so that his hand had swollen to twice the normal size. He was in a freefall for 4 minutes and 36 seconds, reaching a speed of 614 mph (all world records still, and that was 1960). That was his third time jumping: the first time his parachute had wrapped around his neck and he had gone unconscious and into a spin that made his body feel 22 times the force of gravity. He also did stuff like being a fighter pilot in Vietnam and spending 11 months in a Vietnamese prison after being shot down. I was so fascinated with him that I convinced my roommate, who works in film, that we should make a documentary about him. We did a lot of research, started drafting some pitches, but then found that some German production company had already done it. We contacted them, they sent us a copy, and it was much better than we could have done on a shoestring budget.

So, I am teaching quadratic functions, and the physics teacher, who I aligned my curriculum with, was doing projectile motion and gravity, so we decided to use ol’ Cannonballs as a lesson. So many great questions come out of freefalling for that long and from that height. So we showed the documentary in class, and then I just went off on how awesome he was. I was throwing out stats everywhere. Then I started going through the calculations. I was just so excited about this guy that I couldn’t shut up. Then, I started asking some questions, and I was so confused by the crickets. Why didn’t they think this was the coolest thing ever? Are they really that desensitized to awesomeness?

It wasn’t until quite a while later that I realized that it was because I hadn’t left them curious about anything. There wasn’t any bait, I had just thrown the whole damn pole in and hoped that they would like it. I gave out the facts, the formulas, the diagrams, we watched a 45 minute documentary on him, and I just wanted them to be amazed by it all. It wasn’t much different than the way a textbook would have presented the same problem. I was reminded of this yesterday, when I read the Wired article by Jonah Lehrer on curiosity. If you are into armchair neuroscience like myself, then you will dig the whole article. There are some important applications for us as teachers though. Here is one paragraph that is applicable for us:

The results of the fMRI experiment are an intriguing, if limited, glance at the neural processes underlying creativity. The first thing the scientists found is that curiosity obeys an inverted U-shaped curve, so that we’re most curious when we know a little about a subject (our curiosity has been piqued) but not too much (we’re still uncertain about the answer). This supports the information gap theory of curiosity, which was first developed by George Loewenstein of Carnegie-Mellon in the early 90s. According to Loewenstein, curiosity is rather simple: It comes when we feel a gap “between what we know and what we want to know”. This gap has emotional consequences: it feels like a mental itch, a mosquito bite on the brain. We seek out new knowledge because that’s how we scratch the itch.

For the two people still reading this behemoth of a post (hi, mom and dad!): let this be a lesson on your hooks. Even if you are super passionate about it, you still need to bait kids. Get them curious. It is like what Dan has always said in his reasons on why the WCYDWT model is so great: the textbooks give so much away in a problem that there is nothing interesting left to do. You identify the numbers in the problem, plug them in for some variables, and there is your answer. But when you pique their interest with a simple image or video without identifying anything else, immediately you are curious. Natural questions arise. So how would I do this lesson now? If I were to just put up this picture, kids would be really intrigued, and immediately ask questions. How high is he? Is he insane? How big are his balls? (Note: That is probably bad advice)

Cannonballs, I say!

Or, better yet, how about a video?

Notice that I chose a video with not too much information given. Only the height from which he jumped (which I would prefer not to be in there, but couldn’t find a good video without that in the title). Let the discussion with students help piece together what information you really need. How fast should he be going, without air resistance? How fast did he actually go? Does the fact that he was wearing 155 pounds of gear matter? How did the balloon get up that high? So many amazing questions arise from something like this. If you were just to hand out a worksheet with the questions, the information, and the formulas on it, chances are you will probably not have a successful lesson. But by leaving so much left to be discovered gets them hungry for answers, curious on the workings of it all, and hooked.

This is another quote from the Lehrer article, which really drives it all home:

The fact that curiosity increases with uncertainty (up to a point), suggests that a small amount of knowledge can pique curiosity and prime the hunger for knowledge, much as an olfactory or visual stimulus can prime a hunger for food, which might suggest ways for educators to ignite the wick in the candle of learning.