January 2011 – Page 3

Month: January 2011

Total 18 Posts

[PS] Pseudorejects

By Dan Meyer • January 15, 2011 • 16 Comments

These are submissions I received that didn’t seem to fit the criteria. This isn’t to say they’re great problems. This isn’t to say that I’d throw water on any of these problems if they were on fire. This isn’t to say that they’ve even represented or examined their context well, just that the context itself isn’t pseudocontext.

Breedeen Murray

McDougal Litell’s Math Course 1:

Barbara Panther

McGraw-Hill’s Total Math – Grade 6:

Bill goes to a farm and sees cows and chickens. He counts 6 heads and 18 legs. How many of each animal does he see?

Melissa Griffin

Haese and Harris Mathematics for the International Student.:

Jeff Bowlby

McGraw-Hill’s Algebra 1:

Phil Aldridge

EdExcel International’s Longman Mathematics for IGCSE Book 1:

Iain Mackenzie

Scotland National Examination:

Christine Lenghaus

Australian Year 12 Exam:

Amulya Iyer

Pearson’s Algebra 2:

Steve Bullock

Unknown:

Fall Quarter Wrap-Up / Winter Quarter Kick-Off

By Dan Meyer • January 12, 2011 • 17 Comments

Brief Encapsulating Remarks

Academic writing is hard, especially if you’ve grown accustomed for the last five years to posting whatever random 450 words pass through your head at a given moment. Writing even something as basic as a literature review was like trying to run a marathon on sixteen tabs of Benadryl.
Too many units. Someone on the welcome weekend panel – none of us can remember who it was – told us all to max out our units. Never again.
Blogiversity. I was talking to Jo Boaler last night (name drop!) and she admitted she didn’t really get the whole blogging thing. I said I didn’t really get the whole peer-reviewed journal thing. Then I recommended blogging in two ways. First, I showed her the time I asked you to help me identify a core practice of teaching and you came through with 100 (mostly) measured responses. Second, I showed her our ongoing soon-to-end-I-swear investigation of pseudocontext. I’m sure it would’ve taken me many months more to come up with my working definition of pseudocontext had you all not come through with so many examples.

Current Coursework

I’m putting in the minimum this quarter, units-wise:

EDUC250B – Statistical Methods in Education. Eric Bettinger. Required.
EDUC325B – Proseminar. Hilda Borko, Brigid Barron. Required.
EDUC396X/176X – Casual Learning Technologies. Shelley Goldman. With an emphasis on iPhone apps in education. This one’s candy. Here’s the syllabus.

Fall Quarter #GradSkool Tweets

Heroic student in seminar: “Are these articles purposefully obtuse?” #gradskool 4:13 PM Sep 30th, 2010
In CS section taught by a soph. 10 yrs younger than me. I love watching
non-pros teach. This kid is a natural. Great questioning. #gradskool 5:48 PM Oct 1th, 2010
Over a career, it’s possible to align yourself to an incentive and status
structure that will strike laypeople as totally insane. #gradskool 6:48 PM Oct 1th, 2010
Struggling to write like a human being. #gradskool 9:31 PM Oct 3rd, 2010
Pigeons: Central Park :: Bicyclists : College. Fearless pests. #gradskool 5:36 PM Oct 12th, 2010
“Known-answer question” is the awesomest term I learned in #gradskool last week. As in, “My kids hate when I ask known-answer questions.” 8:03 PM Oct 16th, 2010
“By the time you see a paper in a journal, the field has moved on.” (Loeb, 2010, lecture). #gradskool 8:27 PM Oct 22nd, 2010
The proseminar professors are bickering over the definition of a “literature review.” I love when they get going like this. #gradskool 5:27 PM Nov 9th, 2010
Jo Boaler is subbing in my professional pedagogy class. Freak out! #gradskool http://j.mp/d7ybma 10:26 PM Nov 10th, 2010
Critiquing the professor’s book in class, referring to him in the third person. Weird. #gradskool http://j.mp/cCmA3x 6:35 PM Nov 11th, 2010
Stats HW. Find the formula. Identify the variables. Plug ’em in. Weird being on the other side of this arrangement. #gradskool 5:42 AM Nov 12th, 2010

Favorite Papers

These are the ones I gave my highest rating in my aggregator.

Carrel. Does Professor Quality Matter? Evidence from Random Assignment of Students to Professors. NBER Working Paper No. 14081. National Bureau of Economic Research (2008)
Gamoran Sherin and Van Es. Effects of Video Club Participation on Teachers’ Professional Vision. Journal of Teacher Education (2008) vol. 60 (1) pp. 20-37
Rothstein et al. Grading education: Getting accountability right. (2008)
Nelson et al. A culture of collaborative inquiry: Learning to develop and support professional learning communities. The Teachers College Record (2008) vol. 110 (6) pp. 1269-1303
Hiebert et al. A knowledge base for the teaching profession: What would it look like and how can we get one?. Educational researcher (2002) vol. 31 (5) pp. 3
Lewis and Tsuchida. A lesson is like a swiftly flowing river. American Educator (1998) vol. 22 (4) pp. 12—17
Grossman et al. Toward a theory of teacher community. Teachers College Record (2001) vol. 103 (6) pp. 942-1012
Barnes et al. Teaching and the case method: Text, cases, and readings. (1994)
Grossman et al. Teaching practice: A cross-professional perspective. The Teachers College Record (2009) vol. 111 (9) pp. 2055-2100

Winter Speaking & Workshops

Doha, Qatar. January 28-29. Near East South Asia Council of Overseas Schools.
Naperville, IL. February 25. DuPage Valley Mathematics Conference.
San Diego, CA. March 7. California Charter Schools Conference.
Calgary, Canada. March 21. Calgary Regional Consortium.
Edmonton, Canada. March 22. Edmonton Regional Learning Consortium.

[Help Wanted] Seattle Qwest Stadium Beer Cups

By Dan Meyer • January 9, 2011 • 11 Comments

Are any of my readers headed to Seattle’s Qwest Stadium anytime soon? If you are, see if you can score a small and a tall beer cup and take them home. If you’re game, I need three photos:

the menu with beer prices visible.
both cups side-by-side on a counter.
both cups side-by-side on a counter with a centimeter ruler in the same visual plane.

And, yeah, my request ticket has everything to do with this fantastic clip:

[h/t @mcjhn]

[BTW: Bummer. Qwest has already pulled my math unit. Gotta admire their spin, though. “We weren’t ripping off the tall-cup customers. We were giving the short-cup customers a bonus!”]

[PS] Operations That Have Nothing To Do With The Given Context

By Dan Meyer • January 8, 2011 • 35 Comments

Here are three problems that satisfy the second half of the working definition of pseudocontext. I cop to a lot of guilt at the end of this post.

@sophgermain

Prentice Hall’s California Mathematics – Pre-Algebra:

Kevin Krenz

McGraw-Hill’s Mathematics: Applications and Concepts, Course 3:

Wing Mui

McGraw-Hill’s Algebra 1:

Can you spot the common problem?

The author has fit an equation to a context that doesn’t want or need it. Does anybody think the elephant/grizzly problem would be any less engaging if we just described “a mystery number, five sixths of which is 25?”

And I’m guilty. When it comes to systems of equations, I shake a handful of coins and ask students to write down how many coins they think they hear. We trade guesses and I tell them “40 coins.” The best guesser gets some love from the class. Then I ask them to tell me how much cash they think I have in my hands. They ask me for the denominations of the coins. (“Nickels and dimes.”) We trade guesses again, reveal the answer again (“$2.75”), and congratulate the winner again. Then I ask them if they think there’s more nickels or dimes and why. Then we figure out the answer exactly, first by guess-and-check, then by systems of equations as I introduce an unmanageable number of coins. Then I confirm the answer visually.

But seriously: nothing inherent to a handful of nickels and dimes would lead a student to formulate and solve this system of equations.

n + d = 40
5n + 10d = 275

Nothing. Our arrival at that system of equations was painless only on account of a lot of coy teacherly showmanship. Does that theatricality – the shaking coins, the cocked eyebrow, the dramatic pause before the question, none of which is included in the problem as written in the textbook – inoculate the pseudocontext? Am I absolved if I don’t pretend this is (as elephant/grizzly puts it) “when you’re going to use this?” I’m not sure. I’m only sure that implicit in my use of pseudocontext here, whether I’ve inoculated it or not, is the admission that I’m empty-handed when it comes to a real context for systems of equations. I’m admitting that we only use this stuff in silly games.

[It Got Away] Ladder Spreaders

By Dan Meyer • January 7, 2011 • 14 Comments

So I’m looking at this ladder and I’m wondering why they positioned the spreader at that exact height off the base and at that exact length.

I know that OSHA and ANSI each have lengthy manuals governing every dimension of a ladder. I figure there must be some kind of specification for those spreaders, something involving angles, geometry, maybe some trig if I’m lucky.

Maybe I’ll ask the students where they’d find the spreader on a 15-foot tall ladder and at what length. Then I’ll go find a 15-foot ladder and photograph it to verify their answer.

Or maybe we’ll develop an algorithm together, converting our intuitive sense that this ladder isn’t safe into a formula for the safe construction and placement of a spreader.

It Got Away

So I check the OSHA manual for stairways and ladders. Nothing on spreaders. Then I call Werner Ladder Co. to see if they have some kind of internal specification on the spreaders. Two days later, an engineer calls back to tell me that, nah, the spreaders are pretty much irrelevant to safe ladder usage. They only exist, this guy tells me, to guide the sides of the ladder to a specific location, at which point your body weight – not the spreader – keeps the ladder’s position fixed.

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