Comments on: Insurance Against Pseudocontext

By: Dan Meyer

Dan Meyer — Fri, 17 Dec 2010 19:21:27 +0000

But a single anecdote does disprove an absolute. Coming up, we need to talk about methods by which real context – even context with which students aren’t directly familiar – can be made engaging and challenging and immediately real. We’ll certainly file “teacher enthusiasm” among those methods.

By: Perdita

Perdita — Fri, 17 Dec 2010 19:13:56 +0000

It can be the case that Alex was enthusiastic about the problem and his enthusiasm was infectious, though – might not transfer to a different teacher or an everyday practice. The plural of anecdote is not data, as they say.

By: Dan Meyer

Dan Meyer — Fri, 17 Dec 2010 18:15:15 +0000

Perdita: unless the student has a truckdriver in the family, the petrol gauge problem will be no better than a pseudocontext presentation of the same material.

Seems like a stretch. It can't be the case that all of Alex's students have long-haul truckers in the family. There are myriad methods for making unfamiliar context familiar. There are far fewer methods for transforming pseudocontext into real context.

By: James McKee

James McKee — Fri, 17 Dec 2010 14:59:37 +0000

As I read through the posts, there were several that addressed the use of the word “world” in my original post. People have observed (correctly) that the context of any problem may not be engaging to all students.

I am not hopeful that we will be able to generate problems that are universally engaging to all students, and that, for any problem, there will be a subset of our students that don’t find the context engaging. I’m afraid that if we try to work that into a definition of pseudocontext that every problem will be pseudocontext.

But it’s OK if some students don’t find the problem engaging, because some will, and part of what I see as my job is to provide students with snapshots of how mathematics gets to play in everybody’s backyard, and that regardless of what my students “grow up to be,” there will be mathematics that is relevant to their professional “world.” If they’re lucky, it might be engaging (read “fun”) mathematics.

By: Perdita

Perdita — Fri, 17 Dec 2010 08:31:29 +0000

and of course, if the student’s truckdriving friend or relative has a reliable fuel gauge or a different pattern of refilling, you may be out of luck there too…

By: Perdita

Perdita — Fri, 17 Dec 2010 08:18:21 +0000

Yes, that’s interesting speculation. Here’s my counter-speculation: students not already enamoured of maths will tend to be engaged by problems that have personal relevance to them (and to a lesser extent those that have personal relevance to people who have relevance to them); however, there won’t be any difference between how engaged they are by problems that have relevance to someone they don’t especially care about, and how engaged they are by problems that have relevance to nobody. E.g. unless the student has a truckdriver in the family, the petrol gauge problem will be no better than a pseudocontext presentation of the same material.

By: IanR

IanR — Fri, 17 Dec 2010 02:00:49 +0000

This isn’t the right place to post, but FYI, the twitterverse and the blogosphere are abuzz that Yahoo! will shut down delicious. http://techcrunch.com/2010/12/16/is-yahoo-shutting-down-del-icio-us/

By: Dan Meyer

Dan Meyer — Fri, 17 Dec 2010 00:09:48 +0000

Just looked up Descartes Cove and thought I'd note that it's put out by John Hopkins' Center for Talented Youth, which supports my speculation earlier.

By: Dan Meyer

Dan Meyer — Thu, 16 Dec 2010 23:33:51 +0000

It’s true that nobody needs the solution to a pseudocontextual problem. But just because a fourth-grader doesn’t need the solution to an astrophysics problem doesn’t make the astrophysics problem pseudocontext. There we’re talking about the myriad ways we can sully real context.

By: Michael

Michael — Thu, 16 Dec 2010 23:20:17 +0000

Perhaps necessity is the mother of invention and therefore pseudocontext need not apply. That is how we came up with much of our math anyway. We needed to know something and we needed to discover (invent) how to find the answer to our need.

I think pseudocontex occurs when this “need” is artificially (sometimes painfully) forced upon the audience. If I don’t care to know something, there is I have no need, necessarily.

Therefore, can pseudocontext be relative to the observer? One observer can have a need, while another may not, thus creating pseudocontext for the second observer?