Comments on: The Wolverine Wrangler

By: Top 25 blogs for math in the classroom - OnlineDegrees.org

Top 25 blogs for math in the classroom - OnlineDegrees.org — Tue, 05 Mar 2013 17:52:05 +0000

[…] Dan Meyer is a former high-school math teacher and a current doctoral student at Stanford University. He says that his primary interests are curriculum design and teacher education. Notable recent posts include Great Application Problems – A Rubric, The Kannapolis Sessions, and The Wolverine Wrangler. […]

By: Dan Meyer

Dan Meyer — Wed, 24 Nov 2010 20:26:02 +0000

If I knew that obscure a reference, believe me I’d flaunt it.

By: Ben Blum-Smith

Ben Blum-Smith — Wed, 24 Nov 2010 02:34:22 +0000

... was just reading up on something about Hardy and Ramanujan and was reminded that in the 19th century, the top category of scorers in Cambridge University's legendary Mathematical Tripos, one of the most committed programs ever of deciding who's mathematically best and who's worst, were called "the wranglers." That reference can't have been on purpose, can it?

By: The Talent Lie « Research in Practice

The Talent Lie « Research in Practice — Mon, 09 Aug 2010 19:54:35 +0000

[…] While not as credentialed, the Wizard of Oz nonetheless has a fair amount in common with wolverine wranglers. See if you see what I mean. […]

By: Jerzy

Jerzy — Mon, 12 Jul 2010 14:23:36 +0000

@Dan: Cool cool — I was just surprised in your post by “I find their motivations mystifying,” but now I see you meant it specifically about teaching kids, not about “relentless attention to detail just about everywhere else.”

@joshg: “It’s the rest of the world that’s dangerous — the wolverine is waiting to help you tame it.” Right. So maybe you *should* pause and play with the wolverine (do advanced statistical analysis); but instead you just pat it on the head (make inappropriate simplifying assumptions about the data) and keep going, and you miss the fact that it’s trying to let you know you’re about to fall off a cliff? It’s hard to get an extended metaphor just right :-P

@Brendan: “we all get hurt when they learn to fear math” — I definitely agree!

By: Snarkyxanf

Snarkyxanf — Sun, 11 Jul 2010 17:29:56 +0000

@22,

But he was right about the multiplication and addition thing. Teaching multiplication as repeated addition is just a bad explanation, which leaves you cold when it comes to, say, 2.7*3.6, or 1/2 * 5/3, or pi * e.

While we’re at it, functions are not machines.

By: Ben Blum-Smith

Ben Blum-Smith — Sun, 11 Jul 2010 17:00:42 +0000

Devlin is a deep and interesting dude, but I think he's got some wrangler tendencies that subvert his overall demystification program. Do you remember how he kept pulling mathematical rank in that flap about multiplication and repeated addition?

By: Tom

Tom — Sun, 11 Jul 2010 12:43:19 +0000

I think I’m a wolverine wrangler myself, though in a different discipline (foreign language). But there, the point is that often simplifications that have been used to increase accessibility really make future learning harder to do right.

I think some of us wranglers see the damage done by false models students build over years as a result of other teachers attempting to increase accessibility, and we wonder if they’re really more accessible in the first place.

After all, the question “why do you think there should be a linear relationship” is not actually that intimidating, and the answers to it largely lie outside of mathematics. A reasonable student could make a guess based on past experience buying other products, or could try to make a guess about the engineering process etc. A class could quickly google the prices of various drives. None of this strikes me as overly harmful.

By: Snarkyxanf

Snarkyxanf — Sun, 11 Jul 2010 00:28:45 +0000

Zeno doesn’t think math is an angry wolverine. He thinks it’s a fragile racehorse (those things get sick and die if you look at them wrong).

Your students are afraid the math will hurt them. Zeno there seems afraid that if he’s not careful, he’s going to hurt the math.

Admittedly, we don’t want to burden our students with all the intricacies of the care and feeding of mathematics, at least not until they’re much better at it, but there’s something to be said for taking care of it behind the scenes.

Most important would be letting the students know that, unlike an animal, no great harm happens to anyone when math goes wrong—you just try again.

By: Karim @ Mathalicious

Karim @ Mathalicious — Sat, 10 Jul 2010 19:29:15 +0000

For what it’s worth, I’ve been goofing around with Sketchpad for the past few hours, trying to figure out how to calculate the slope between one point. I think the program’s busted. GSP6?