Here’s what I’m trying to say. It’s easy enough to write the following pseudocontextual problem:

Dan shot a basketball from the three-point line. The ball followed the path given by the equation:

.

How many units high will the ball be at its highest point?

Try to commit that pseudocontext to a photo, though. It isn’t impossible, but it’s much, much harder.

That’s all I meant. Not that I think Star Wars is real.

I owe Brian Caine a debt of gratitude for flipping my switch on the question of “what is multimedia doing for us, anyway?”

Multimedia makes it really, really hard to lie.

Witness David Cox’s toaster regression. It doesn’t work. We thought it was linear. It isn’t. It isn’t worthless for classroom inquiry. Maybe it’s exponential. But the linear model is a dead end.

If you’re writing the problem in a textbook, though, it isn’t a dead end. You grab some clip art of a toaster. You create a table with values that are linear because who’s going to stop you? Even though the real context isn’t linear, you’re the god of your textbook’s pseudocontext.

Then you fabricate a conclusion that supports the pseudocontext.

For whatever other good it does for problem posing, multimedia keeps you honest. How do you (easily) film pseudocontext? How do you take a picture of a premise that is false? Even harder, how do you take a picture of the conclusion of that false premise in a way that doesn’t belie the premise itself?

Arla, a Swedish yogurt producer.

Translation:

You catch a pike but the scales are broken. The pike weighs two kilograms plus half its weight. How much does it weigh?

Pseudocontext

At this point I’m comfortable with two definitions of pseudocontext:

1. context that is flatly untrue: “a basketball team scores two points every minute for the duration of the game.”
2. operations that have nothing to do with the given context: “the age of Mark’s dad is three more than four times Mark’s age.”

We’ve worked hard for those two categories. We’ve digested some really untasty mathematics in their development. They indicate problems that aren’t just boring or irritating but problems that are actually alienating, problems that disrupt a student’s innate and true sense of the world.

Pseudocontext Saturdays will run their course eventually. For now, though, the intellectual challenge of identifying different levels of badness (and, in many cases, redeeming it) is too invigorating to give them up. Those of you who have invested time and effort on these features in the comments and in your submissions – thanks.

Assignment:

1. Scan an example of pseudocontext.
2. Email it to dan@mrmeyer.com
3. List the textbook title, edition, and publisher.
4. Give me your interpretation of the term “pseudocontext.”
5. Let me know if you’d like credit (name, blog or twitter) or if you’d prefer anonymity.