And, even if the math way doesn’t give a huge benefit, it’s still an estimation lesson. Students start to get a feel for when a situation can benefit from more precision and when a quick estimation will get you 80% of the way in 20% of the time.

My school had meetings this week to brainstorm ideas for ways to incentivize our sophomores to care about the CAHSEE. I seemed to be the only one who thought this was a joke. As if I don’t have better things to do with my time than find a way to bribe a 15 year old to give a damn about the CAHSEE.

It took me a while, Dan, but I’m starting to understand your passion for WCYDWT and I’m going to start putting more of an effort into recognizing them when I see them. Apparently I have meetings at my school where I can make good use of time to do just that.

In the meantime, go get the book!!!

I’m guessing the sort of educator who reads blogs and writes comments isn’t the sort of hack teacher who screwed you over in your early math education. The crowd around here (including myself) screws up, sure, but more for lack of any better ideas than for negligence or lack of ambition.

Which makes your Found Functions invaluable for those of us trying to engage the sassy, artistic twerp in our back rows. Same goes for Radiolab, which is a fan favorite around here.

My own particular obsessions have drawn me to a style of mathematical inquiry tied to digital media I dubbed What Can You Do With This? It bears enough surface similarities to your own Found Functions that some readers started forwarding them along. It was worth it to me here to draw a line in the sand distinguishing your work from mine.

At the same time, I’m glad to have a slightly larger bag-of-tricks than I did week ago. So thanks.

Anyway! SO, I’m a student. So I’m hoping my perspective a little more carefully explained this time can help. Maybe it can’t, I don’t know.

So I used to dislike math, or at least be frustrated with it and never want to do it, I was lazy, it was stupid, etc. But playing with calculators in the back of class and poking different buttons to see what stupid little lines they’d make? Hell yes. Give me that. “Whatever I’ll look at the book when I have a test” kinda thing. Which I did. And I hate it now, but I at least looking back, I can understand what I was thinking, and try and also help (or at least try to) conjecture about how to fix the issue at hand.

So I’ve grown to love math as a student. Actually, no, I haven’t. (see also: http://sundayandwednesday.com/nikkigraziano/its-long-i-know/) I’ve grown to love math. As a human, I guess. I hate being a student in math because of all the crap that’s associated with it. I’m starting to realize the whole thing is pretty hopeless, it’s not really today’s teachers’ faults, at least not entirely. I know lots of teachers who try really hard and care about teaching, but ultimately our culture has just accepted one way of doing things and won’t let it go. But I feel really strongly about the way Math is taught, and even though I’m realizing there’s a bigger, cultural issue at hand, I definitely want to fight against it, however hopeless. Because how I ended up loving math is still really a mystery to me. Yeah, I had awesome teachers along the way, and they may or may not have subconsciously shaped the way I think about it, but I still saw it as just memorizing and spitting out, and I happened to be good at THAT, so I happened to “do well” in “math,” and once I didn’t have to do it anymore (art school, you know, “free spirits”) I instantly missed it. Or, well, after two years of not doing it. Not quite instantly. But I was THAT kid in the back of the class in school! Who didn’t care! I probably really pissed a lot of my teachers off, actually, now that I think about it. I was the embodiment of the problem, the unmotivated, don’t-care-attitude, sassy little twerpy kid who makes teachers say, “WHAT IS IT. WHAT am I doing WRONG? HOW can I FIX THIS KIDS BRAIN.”

Now I’m not trying to say that the way art is taught is perfect, also there’s no “do this and it works and you’re done” method. I probably didn’t even have to say that last part, but, whatever. Art school is VERY very far from perfect and I’m also not sure how to even think about “fixing” that monstrosity either, but at the very least, I know that the whole “way” “art school” works–the process of playing, discussing, making bad work and being okay with it, open critiques, defending my ideas, learning what ideas of my OWN to trust, and then actually trusting those ideas, seeing what amazing things my professors were capable of, (I’ll stop, sorry)–are the concepts that made me look at a friend’s Calc homework one day sophomore year, and say WOAH. WOAH WOAH. I GET THIS. I REMEMBER THIS. THIS IS SO SO BEAUTIFUL. There’s also the obvious difference between college and K-12, but, I don’t know. I took Calc I in high school cause I was “good at it” and I wasn’t really all that excited by it. Then two years later I fell in love with differentiation? So it is possible.

I’m going to offer some more “idea stuff” and sorry if it’s repetitive, I’m just trying to think of any initial stuff that I looked at that made me relate to math and really enjoy it.

Radiolab? It’s amazing. This might be the clincher of what convinced to go back to school for math.
http://www.radiolab.org/
Again I’m not sure what age you teach, it might be too heavy for say seventh or eighth graders, probably even high school freshmen, it takes a lot of patience to just sit and listen. But if you haven’t checked it out for yourself you should. They’re good at demonstrating a sort of abstract thinking that’s necessary for math and science, but also really really beautiful, like how poets and artists and “right brain people” see little details that are almost unimportant.

Ellsworth Kelly. He’s a painter. No no sorry, he’s a “conceptual artist that paints” but since conceptual art is supposed to be the “mad scientist” of art-isms, I’m assuming kids won’t really have to know anything to like this. Here’s a link of MoMA’s below, it’s got some of his work on it, but if you find that you’re interested and poke around the internet some more you’ll definitely find them.

He looks at the 3D world around us, but sees only the 2D plane of his perspective, like how in my photos if I moved it’d be a completely different curve to map. So he makes these canvases into the geometric shapes that he sees as 2D. The titles of the works from this series usually give you a good idea of it’s supposed to be. This is a good explanation:

http://www.moma.org/collection/browse_results.php?criteria=O:AD:E:3048&page_number=13&template_id=1&sort_order=1

Hope this is of some help. Especially if you just read that entire thing and it wasn’t. :\

N

Megan: Quadratic functions, muzzle velocities of 9mm handguns, and a bunch of calculations later, we decided it likely would’ve broken skin. But, dang – I don’t run into these very often!

The good news is that these packets aren’t like flowers or bananas. They’ll outlast us all.

If you like math and you use math and you want to play along with me, why don’t you write down the next few times math crops in your life, the next time you use it explicitly or it implicitly makes life a little more meaningful. We’ll brainstorm it out from there.

What happens for me rarely is that I get the perfect alignment of math stuff in the real world at a level that is appropriate for what I’m teaching.

The best one I ever had? http://www.flickr.com/photos/mgolding/3160848346/

Last year, a bullet came through the canvas top of my Jeep, passed through the driver’s seat (not to worry, I wasn’t in there), and bounced off the floorboard where I found it the next day.

Now, I like math.
And I use math.

So, I brought this to my kids and asked my own (real) question – would that thing have gone through my leg if I’d been in the car at the time?

Quadratic functions, muzzle velocities of 9mm handguns, and a bunch of calculations later, we decided it likely would’ve broken skin. But, dang — I don’t run into these very often!

I think your use of “rote” is what’s naive. It reminds me a little of Phase 1: steal underpants, Phase 2: (silence), Phase 3: profit. I’m pretty sure Parker&Stone’s underpants gnomes were supposed to be sending up investor-types whose system for making money amounted to some vigorous hand waving…but be honest “then you just flip it and turn it into a challenge for your students” is also a little hand wave-y. It’s not something anyone was born doing and hardly anyone has been taught to do, it’s a difficult skill we have to work hard for. (And the teachers on the Internet culture doesn’t seem to promote developing difficult skills you have to work hard for – it seems to promote dashing off comments after thinking about them for 30 seconds and retweeting aphorisms that are supposed to fix everything.) Anyway, it’s certainly not rote for me. That’s all.