The crossover assignment.

Here we moved between pie- and stacked-bar graphs using the indescribably (and, with respect to the movie itself, disproportionately) awesome one sheet to The Kingdom.

This time around, as a concession to time constraints, I gave them the survey results.

The Kingdom Analysis handout (contains both pie- and stacked-bar graphs)

Similar to ID111 but with movie posters. Somewhere in between these two we practiced measuring and drawing angles.

I stressed that I wanted their reaction to the poster itself and not to the movie, which some students doubtlessly hadn’t seen.

I included two of my favorite one sheets. Reactions came back mixed and I lamented silently how NCLB has looted artistic appreciation in our nation’s public school for corporate fun and profit.

Fun questions to ask (again):

1. Who loved the most one sheets?
2. Who hated the most one sheets?
3. Whose one sheet was the most hated?
4. Whose one sheet was the most liked?

One Sheet Analysis Template (student carries this from desk to desk)
Personal Pie Graph Template (student makes her personal pie graph on this)
One Sheet Analysis Template II (this stays with each one sheet for students to mark)
One Sheet Class Analysis Template (this follows the one sheet from class to class)
The One Sheets We Used (formatting is left as an exercise for the reader)
Student Protractors (print ’em out on overhead transparency)

I downloaded thirty-or-so old school album covers (like, old school), enough for each member of them class, printed them all out on matte photo paper for $4.50 at a photo boothBumped into some trouble with one printer who cited copyright restrictions. ¶ I tried as pleasantly as I could to explain that what she didn’t know about Fair Use could fill up the Grand Canyon and spill over the sides. Dialogue kinda spiraled down from there. Next I knew some rent-a-cop was ushering me outside. ¶ (Well how would you have handled the situation?), and passed one out to each kid along with a tally sheet.

The kid categorized her reaction to her own album cover as one of “Love,” “Like,” “Dislike,” or “Hate.”Hence, old school album covers. I wanted them to react to the design, which everyone could respond to, whereas if they had heard the album, an unbiased, informed opinion would be a tough to ask of every student. The student then wandered from desk to desk, making two marks per album cover. One on her own sheet, which she carried with her, and one on the tally sheet, which stayed at a desk.

Then she got back to her desk and made two stacked bar charts. One for her own design tastes. And one for how well the class regarded her album cover.

I used the same album cover for each of my three algebra periods and had them use the same color legend so the result was a kind-of-slick representation of how the classes differed. (For instance, third period had some extreme reactions to the Devo cover below while the other two periods were more tempered in their enthusiasm.)

Fun questions to ask:

1. Who loved the most covers?
2. Who hated the most covers?
3. Whose cover was the most hated?
4. Whose cover was the most liked?

Stacked Bar Template I
Album Covers We (Dis)like Handout
The Album Covers We Used (ready for 4×6 printing)

Homework the previous night was to record the genre of the next 25 songs they listened to. I showed ’em how to sort their songs by “Last Played” in iTunes.

They came back the next day and I had them tally up their genres, again, building stacked bars of their music preferences. Everyone used the same color/genre legends and we posted a long strip of music preferences on the back wall.

For reasons I can’t quite recall, I had them come up to my laptop at the front and punch their preferences into a GoogleDocs spreadsheet also. Makes me sound like some School 2.0 badass but I didn’t do anything with it that I can remember.

I did beat it into them over and over again how cool it was we could draw conclusions about our class’ preferences at a quick glance.

Music Analysis Homework
“Music We Like” Wall Poster