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.
When I Heard the Learn’d Astronomer
I’ve been teaching summer school for 4 weeks to a bunch of nerds who enjoy learning so much that they came to school and listened to me blabber on for 2 hours about math and science just because I said I would be there and it would be fun. Nerds, I say!
It’s been an amazing experience, actually. I would post some of the stuff that I’ve done, but most of it would look eerily familiar because I’ve basically just been scouring Sam’s Virtual Filing Cabinet for some fun stuff to do each day. Thanks, everybody!
Things have been super loose, so we’ve been able to chase some stuff that we would not have been able to do in a regular class, like getting lost in a Wolfram Alpha wormhole of excellence, or discussing fractals and chaos theory. We’ve discussed a lot about astronomy, and how Eratosthenes and Aristarchus made measurements of the Earth and Sun and Moon so long ago using basic trigonometry, and my students showed an amazing ability to figure out their methods with hardly any prompting from me. We’ve played with PhET to build circuits after doing some intense math work to find total resistance.
I think the best thing that has happened is that we’ve been able to experience wonder. Kids were asking a bunch of questions about space and astronauts yesterday after we watched a short video from NASA of a plane that flies in a parabolic path to simulate microgravity situations. They were messing around with catapults that I built out of clothespins and sporks and worked almost completely independently through Sweeney’s amazing catapult lab. they have been playing with math and science, and I’ve seen a huge improvement in their problem solving skills over the month. There have been a lot of questions, including a lot of things that I didn’t know either, and they didn’t mind that I would go to the computer and look it up with them. I was really excited to see them not fretting over formulas and steps and algorithms and methods and tests, and I was reminded of one of my favorite poems from Walt Whitman.
When I Heard the Learn’d Astronomer
When I heard the learn’d astronomer;
When the proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns before me;
When I was shown the charts and the diagrams, to add, divide, and measure them;
When I, sitting, heard the astronomer, where he lectured with much applause in the lecture-room,
How soon, unaccountable, I became tired and sick;
Till rising and gliding out, I wander’d off by myself,
In the mystical moist night air, and from time to time,
Look’d up in perfect silence at the stars.
I sure hope that I can keep up this sense of wonder in the school year. It’s been a blast.
Or, I suppose: Virtual Conference on Soft Skills
So, here’s something.
I was really racking my brain, trying to think of what soft skill out of my vast arsenal I should share with the world.
Relentless sarcasm!
Being a jackass!
Threatening kids with imminent peril!
A generally misanthropic demeanor!
I mean, this guy knows soft skills:
This is my soft skills face.
I just ate a pint of Ben & Jerry’s, so I will be a bit more on the optimistic side. Here is what I’ve settled on…
My school holds the TfA Summer Institute, so I’ve mentored some of the incoming Teach for America robots the past couple of summers during their training, convincing them the best that I can not to drink too much of the Kool-Aid, and they always want to know some algorithm that I use for classroom management and getting students to buy in.
It’s frustrating, because the first thing we do as (good) teachers is disparage how students start begging for a formula immediately. We say, explore the concepts! Think about what the problem wants us to solve! Life is not a bunch of formulas that you just plug stuff into!
Now, that isn’t to say that procedures aren’t useful. I am all about procedures. But mainly because I am just super-OCD, and its a comfort thing. And my students enjoy having certain aspects of class being constant each day, like little OCDs (Obsessive Compulsive Disciples).
But just like our students run into trouble when they see 3 numbers in a problem and multiply them together because that’s what they had done in the last problem, we run into problems when we try to apply a macro-solution to individuals. When a student doesn’t finish a project because he just moved back into a homeless shelter for the umpteenth time, or a student keeps falling asleep because she has cancer and the treatments are exhausting, or a student can’t focus because her best friend had recently been shot and killed- all extreme, yes, but all things I dealt with in one month’s time last fall, and sadly, something that anyone of us could have to deal with at any time- no amount of procedures will alleviate those situations.
I cringe when I see teachers with their complex Skinner box system that they had set up in their classrooms, with stickers! and demerits! and free pencils! and pony rides! And then they complain about how many kids are still disruptive or not buying in. Plenty of my kids don’t care about stickers, or as Kate so beautifully wrote, refuse to comply just because of some extrinsic motivator. So I say, explore the individual! Think about what problem you need to solve! Life is not a bunch of procedures that you plug situations into!
How does this manifest itself for me?
The biggest thing is that I find ways to give kids space to be weird. Because they are kids. And kids are weird. And the fact that they are sitting upright and not talking and being assessed every period of every day and not even THINKING about doodling or laughing or taking real electives or anything, because zOMG! we have TESTS TO PREPARE FOR!!!… well, I am bored just walking down the hallway at our school. The best place for this space to happen is my room at lunch time. Not everyone will have this luxury, but my room is an open space for lunch. I have anywhere from 10 to 30 kids every day hanging out, doing what they need to do to make it through the day sane. For some kids, they come in and get help on their work. Some kids come in and play chess. Other kids start a coffee shop. I’m sure a bunch of kids come in just to listen to me play ukulele and accordion because it is so awesome. But regardless, they are free to get up, walk around, talk, draw, do something that makes them feel like an individual again.
A lot of our kids hang out after school too. I have gotten to know so much about many of my students by having them hang out in my room. One of the best things about my school is that many of the teachers will stay after for 2 or 3 hours, working with kids or just giving them a place to be. The truth is, many of them have no desire to go home. Home lives are rough for many of them. More of them have a whole new set of responsibilities that take over as soon as they go home, and they want to hang onto the feeling of being a high school student a little longer that day.
I believe it is because of this investment that many of my kids have bought in. And I can push them so much further than they could have been pushed with some sticker chart. Unfortunately, there is no “You are being an ass right now” sticker that I’ve seen, although the Scratch-n-Sniff company should get on that pronto. But them spending 3 extra hours in my classroom each week gives me the opportunity to talk about their behavior or their work ethic in a personal way. I actually am a jackass some most every day, because I push and push and refuse to allow anything less than full investment from them, because that is exactly what I am doing for them every day.
Let it be clear that there is nothing magical that I am doing. There is no algorithm. I don’t woo them in with some charm and they are all of a sudden amazing students. Believe me, charming is an adjective that will never be used to describe me. I will be just as boring or just as scatterbrained as anyone else any day. I am just lucky to be working where I am, because so many of my fellow teachers care about the individual. As I watched some of the seniors walk across the stage last month, I was so proud of what we as a team had done. The girl who had missed most of the previous two years because of cancer graduated on time, because a couple of teachers made sure that she stayed caught up with her work. The girl who had a freak medical accident and was in a coma for a while, missing most of her junior year? Graduated, because of an all-hands-on-deck situation with the teachers willing to spend time making up work with her so that she could pass her state tests and graduate. A girl who had dropped out for a semester because of psychological issues became one of the biggest leaders in her class, because some teachers reached out to her. Kid after kid walked past and made me choke up, thinking about how they could barely read two years ago, or had bounced around in random living situations for 4 years, or how many times ACS had been called on their behalf, and I couldn’t believe that they had made it.
There wasn’t a sticker chart in sight. It was beautiful. Just 100 individuals, walking across the stage, celebrating a milestone.
I found a couple of pictures of my student who I mentioned in the last post, and thought of a couple other good stories.
No matter what the weather was like, he would wear a jacket. He either had a leather jacket or an outdoors-type jacket. If it were freezing outside, that is what he would wear. If it were really hot, he would still be wearing a jacket.
For a while, he came to school wearing both of them at the same time. I asked him one day why he was wearing two jackets. He gave me a big smile, reached into the pockets of the inner jacket, and pulled out two huge handfuls of candy, and said, “Maximum storage!”
Maximum Storage!
A few days later, he came in to my room before school, and was wearing two jackets again. I said, “oh, got a bunch of candy again? Can I have a piece?”
He again got a huge smile on his face, reached inside the inner jacket, and instead pulled out a rubber chicken.
Rubber Chicken!
That is why this kid is the best.
Class of 2010. A quasi-novel. Part I.
My students graduated yesterday. I am sad. I almost broke my no-crying streak, which is around 4 years now (last cry: my brothers wedding, June 2006. embarrassing. i covered it up by sucking down a helium balloon before i gave the best man speech.) i mean, its nothing compared to the no-hiccups streak (since 1994), but still impressive. but i held strong.
Anyways. I don’t deal well with change. My students make fun of me all of the time for eating the same thing for lunch every single day (an everything bagel toasted with cream cheese and a dr. pepper). I have taught a lot of the students of the class of 2010 for 3 years now, and I have no idea what I will do with myself when they leave.
I’m still really annoyed with the Algebra 2 state test, and I haven’t yet come to terms with the fact that this group of students that I’ve come to love so much is leaving. I’ve tried to write a couple posts over the past two weeks, and they just came out really vindictive and angry, not snarky and acerbic as is my usual style. So instead of trying that, I’m just going to celebrate some of my seniors.
My first real teaching success in Brooklyn was with this weird kid in my 1st period class in my first year. This big kid came in every day and would almost immediately fall asleep. I would try to wake him up and wouldn’t get much more than a grunt out of him. One day, finally, I say, “Dude, you have got to wake up. Get a pen out, let’s go.” He says that he doesn’t have a pen. “How can you not have a pen? Its first period!”
“I threw it at a bum.”
“Wait. Did you just say you threw your pen at a homeless man this morning?”
Somehow, I convinced him to stay after school and make up some work. I am pushing him to give me something, but he is so deficient in skills that we aren’t getting anywhere. Finally, he says, “You know what would be awesome? I’m going to build the world’s biggest robot. Out of chocolate. And it will have lasers for eyes. And then I’m going to take it for walks around my neighborhood. And then I’m going to eat it. But don’t eat the electricity!”
My jaw pretty much drops. What the hell is this kid talking about? But I love it. So I keep having him stay after school, and we slowly get more work done, but he also continues to give me brilliant ideas. They all start with, “You know what would be awesome?” And they were awesome.
“You know how they have beer helmets? They should have ice cream backpacks.”
“I want to make glow-in-the-dark hair gel. Raves would be much easier.”
“They should genetically engineer an anteater to dispense cheese. Then, you could have a picnic, and eat nachos!”
He started to put more time into his schoolwork. His essays for history class were brilliant. He picked up some basic math skills. Most things he said in class were crazy non-sequiturs like, in a discussion about the internet, he says, “The internet. Where men are men, women are men, and children are FBI agents.” In a discussion in economics, he starts debating about supply and demand of Hot Pockets and Slim Jims. In US History, he asks about Halloween during the Great Depression. Surmises that the candy was lacking, but the number of foreclosures makes a lot of great haunted houses. He also really came out of his shell, and everyone found out that this kid was funny. He would bring a rubber chicken to school for no reason other than to hold it up in the hallway and say, “look, a rubber chicken.” He would draw comics, first about a kid who drank a lot of Windex and would go on magical trips, “kind of like the Magic School Bus.” Then, he started drawing a comic of the Waffle Ninja, whose parents were killed in some sort of pancake debacle, so he decided to become a vigilante, throwing frozen waffles to stop crime and jumping from roof to roof to give people free cable. I continued to work with him. After 2 years, he only had 11 credits. 44 are needed to graduate. Junior year, he really hit his stride. Passed every single class except 1. He became a presence in the school, staying after every day to do homework and then play monopoly with me and a few other kids. Then, one day, he got a great idea.
“Tomorrow, I’m going to start a coffee shop.”
He sat down at my computer, put together an amazing picture of a coffee mug that said “The Cup,” and posted like 40 copies around school, haphazardly hung in the hallway and on the principal’s office door. No word on when or where, just crooked signs of coffee mugs all over the school.
The next day, I had over 30 kids in my room. I don’t know how they all found out. He had 2 coffee pots brewing, selling coffee for 1 dollar to students, 75 cents for teachers, and 25 cents for the Pinball club, which was me and two other kids who used my Smartboard to play pinball many days after school. He had milk and sugar (with a pricing system: an extra quarter for more than 6 spoonfuls of sugar in your coffee), had hot water to make hot chocolate. I always have had 15 kids or so come in my room for some extra help during lunch, but this was out of control. They had rearranged my desks to make a coffee shop atmosphere, and all of these kids were hanging out peacefully, reading or doing homework. I put on some Miles Davis, and it was awesome. My student raked in over 40 dollars from a lunch and after-school shift. I asked how much profit he made, when he admitted that he left Dunkin Donuts and forgot to pay for the coffee, so it was all profit.
This lasted much longer than I thought it would. A few days in, my principal came in and said that she didn’t know if we could keep having my room double as a coffee shop. I started to argue with her, saying that he was really figuring out some important skills for the first time. He had made a few adjustments to his pricing, had some staff working for him, cleaning out coffee pots and wiping down my desks, and really doing some real math for the first time. I said to him, “Isn’t that right? You are doing a lot of math, making change for people and stuff?”
He responded, “I’m making so much change, I should work for Obama.”
After about 3 weeks, he said to me, “I’m going to close down the Cup for a while.” I asked him why. He said, “I need to get my shit together right now.” And he does. He knocks out a couple of the state tests that he hadn’t yet passed. He more than doubles the number of credits that he has.
Then, senior year, I don’t have him in class anymore. I’m creating two curricula from scratch, am the Data Specialist for my school, I work for the NYC Department of Education so I have mountains of bullshit to put up with every single day that wastes my time, and I’m trying my best to keep the 120 students that I have from falling apart and not only learn to factor, but to factor trigonometric functions that involve double angle identities. Damn you, NY and your ridiculous standards! I lose track of my student, and he kind of disappears. Goes a week without coming to school. I try talking to his parents, but his immigrant family doesn’t seem to mind him missing school when he has a good job at a bakery that helps bring in money. I convince him to come back to school for a while, which he does, and then he falls off again. He goes from missing 2 days a week, to 4, to almost every day, and finally, he’s gone.
Yesterday at graduation, I was so sad to not see him there. I wonder what things would have been like for him if we were a better school. On paper, for a public high school in Brooklyn, we are amazing. 90% graduation rate! Everyone of those kids accepted to college! According to the numbers, top 5 in the entire city. But it has been so hard for some of the eccentric kids who have come through our doors to be successful, because our school is boring. 2 periods a day of English. 2 periods a day of history. Some kids have 2 periods a day of math. If there isn’t a required state test for it, you don’t take it. Art is just a credit you have to get for graduation, so it is basically a coloring class where everyone passes. We don’t offer a music class, although we live in NEW YORK CITY.
I don’t know how to fix it.
Mathematical Badassymptotes
I’m in my third year of teaching in Brooklyn. It really took me a while to figure things out where I didn’t feel like a total train wreck every day (note: I still feel like a train wreck. Just maybe only like, 85% of the time). I realized recently one of the things that has been a mark of my maturity as a teacher has been my response to the question that we all hate:
“When are we ever going to use this?”
A Timeline of Responses to the Question, “When are we ever going to use this?”
Year One: “On a test. Next Friday. Start studying.”
Year Two: “To get into Heaven. Seriously. Better start studying, I would hate to have that on my conscience.”
Year Two.Five: Assorted actual reasons, typically related to some aspect of Physics that none of my students will ever use.
Then: What happened? Why aren’t my kids bugging me with this question anymore? I didn’t even realize it, until I started thinking about how my teaching has evolved, just over this last semester. I finally felt comfortable enough with myself, with my classroom management, and with my delivery of the basic stuff that I started shaking up some stuff. That’s when I stumbled on some of these blogs, and saw the amazing stuff that people like Sam and Dan and Kate and Shawn were doing, and felt really sorry for myself, and for my students, because they were bored. I mean, good God, what was I doing?
So that’s when I started doing things differently. Teaching about Applebee’s and accordions and other things that I hope to write up if I have the time soon. And why would a student ever have to ask, “When are we going to use this?” when you introduced the whole concept while using it? It just seems so easy.
Then, another weird thing started happening. They also, on occasion, would ask, “who invented this?” (or, the more crass version from select students: “Who came up with this shit?”). My witty response was typically, “God,” but its only witty the first 500 times they ask it. So, since they were getting into the applications, why not share with them who actually did come up with it?
I mean, just look at this guy.
It started with Euler. Euler is my favorite mathematician ever. I talked for a pretty long time in class about all of the work he did blind when we discussed the natural base. Then, I made a joke a couple weeks later when a girl broke her arm and couldn’t write, about how if Euler could do math blind, surely she could do work with a broken arm, and a bunch of kids laughed. Did they actually listen when I was ranting about Euler for so long before?
Someone get this guy a brew.
So next I talked about Gauss, which I always pronounced in the really-bad-arnold-schwarzenegger-impression-from-conan-o’brien voice. They loved it. The whole story of him as a kid, outsmarting his teacher. Luckily he was in two units in a row, with Gaussian distribution and with arithmetic series, so they got used to him. I randomly threw in a bonus question on a quiz like two weeks later, and almost all of the students knew not only who Gauss was (except for the kid who wrote, ‘he started communism’), and what he did, but how he did it. Which means that most of my students knew how to do an arithmetic series, right?
Will my students always remember who Bernoulli was? Probably not. And most people go through life without knowing who Bernoulli is (or, which Bernoulli did what. I mean, there were a lot of those suckers). It’s just another point of entry for them, if delivered right. They find the craziness of people like Cantor fascinating and intriguing, and that’s not something I ever would have expected.
I guess that is what they call growth.
Taking Down Applebee’s
So, I caught this image on twitter as a WCYDWT a few weeks ago…
How fortuitous that I was teaching combinatorics that week. And with Applebee’s, I can teach two life lessons in one: how to compute combinations, and the experience of a white suburban kid who was forced to go to Applebee’s ALL THE TIME during high school because in a little town in Ohio there really aren’t many cool places to hang out. My Brooklyn students think that I’m making up stories of going to high school across the street from a pig farm or having to run through a corn field to get errant shots during soccer practice or that school got canceled because of snow a lot because it took a long time for the horse & buggy to plow the streets.
So, I did some research. Here are the facts:
9 different menu items:
Boneless Buffalo Wings, Dynamite (!) Shrimp, Spinach and Artichoke Dip, Cheeseburger Sliders, Steak Quesadilla Towers, Buffalo Chicken Wings, Mozzarella Sticks, and two new additions: Wonton Tacos and Spicy Queso Blanco.
You are allowed to choose 3 for one low price (in Brooklyn, $15.49!!!)
There are allegedly over 200 different combinations.
So, I put this image on the board at the start of class. I started talking about how much I hated Applebee’s and that I was starting a boycott. Students are intrigued to join the cause, and want to know why. I explain the situation. Then I make the claim: Applebee’s has either false advertising or really bad mathematicians working for them.
Students are a little more intrigued than they were when I wowed them with solving trigonometric identities, so they humor me. Through some discussion, we come up with the following:
You can choose 3 different appetizers: 9C3, or 84 possibilities.
You can choose 2 of the same appetizer and 1 of another (example: 2 wanton tacos and 1 dyn-o-MITE shrimp): 9C2, or 36 possibilities.
Any of the previous 36 possibilities, but with the other choice doubled: (example: 1 wanton taco and 2 dyn-o-MITE shrimp): another 9C2, or 36 possibilities.
If you were really crazy, you could triple up on the same appetizer (i mean, 3 orders of cheeseburger sliders? should that count as an option?): 9 possibilities.
Grand total of choices is 165. Even my most difficult students were able to surmise that this is less than the 200 combination claim. They seemed sufficiently angry at being duped by the Man, so I claimed that the only option was to boycott Applebee’s.
My students instead demanded that we call corporate and complain. So I handed my phone to one of my more vocal students, hoping that some of the vitriol that had been directed at me at times could be channeled for mathematical good. Surprisingly, a call to 1.888.59APPLE was answered fairly quickly, and my student immediately started explaining our mathematical discovery. The guy on the other line claimed that there are 5 sauce choices, which count as different options. Immediately the class went into a calculating frenzy. 13C3 +2*(13C2) +13C1 = 455! Apparently Applebee’s had planned for this conversation with math students, because they verified that 455 choices were possible. The student on phone then asked: Why would they claim 200 if there are actually 455 choices? Maybe we should talk about your advertising rather than your mathematics! Another student: What if we ordered one thing with tomatoes and another without tomatoes? Is that a different choice? There are different meat choices for the wanton tacos too, does that count? With each question, the guy on the phone backtracked more and more, now claiming that different meats and different toppings were different choices, so now there were seemingly thousands of different possible combinations, until finally he hung up on us.
A couple weeks later, a couple of my students came in and told me that they had been by an Applebee’s over the weekend and had decided to raise some hell. They asked their waiter to show them all 200 different combinations, and when he claimed that he would not do that, they called him a liar and left.
I don’t know if I have ever been so proud as a teacher. Now if there were only some company misusing the quadratic formula…
Classroom Decorations and such…
So, grad school classes are done, so I might actually have time to do this blog thing. To start off…
Classroom decorations.
See, administrators really love this crap. They will rave about the fact that there are nerdy pictures of Garfield claiming the classroom to be a “critical thinking zone” or something. I have better things to do, and can remember specific times when I had 25 students in my room during my lunch period working on becoming better math students, and was told that my classroom needed more decorations. For a long time, I heard that they couldn’t even tell that my room was a math room. So along came this poster, which now sits looming over the SmartBoard, giving the kids a staredown when they are unfocused…
I felt that it made it clear enough that my room was a critical thinking zone for mathematics. I mean, look at that face.
Not enough? OK, how about a relic of Six Flags Physics Day last year?
Maybe the best is the attention to detail- my coworker actually spread ketchup all over his face to make this seem more dramatic.
I got to take a group of students to Six Flags again this year for Physics Day, which they thoroughly enjoyed. It seems it was the first interaction many of them have had with the suburban physics nerd, which was really fun. They also had a good time hunting for really bad physics puns on T-shirts.
The physics teacher and I spent the day trying to recreate a similar fabulous photo for classroom decoration purposes, and here is what we came up with….
If more students are successful in math because of these posters, then I have done my job.
Hold On To Your Pants
I’m going to start a math blog. It will be the coolest.
Be prepared to have your minds blown.
