Comments on: [WCYDWT] The Daily Show

By: Gary D

Gary D — Wed, 01 Feb 2012 15:14:08 +0000

Oops – should be an increase of 130 employees, growing from 10 to 140.

Measure twice, post once.

By: Gary D

Gary D — Wed, 01 Feb 2012 15:11:37 +0000

Revisited these problems today. Romney’s still relevant (for a little while at least!)

An extension on this would be to compare linear and exponential growth. Assuming Bain were increasing employees at a linear rate, how long would it take to employ 20 million…

The current company would have to havegrown from 10 to 130 employees in 26 years, for an increase of 5 employees per year for linear growth to employ 20 million in 4 million years. Not quite hundreds, but maybe that’s what the Daily Show math people were thinking…

By: Joshua Schmidt

Joshua Schmidt — Sun, 17 Apr 2011 04:57:40 +0000

Emily, great find! I think that gives an answer to how far off the estimate is. Students are always more interested when their is a “right” answer. Although I as a Math teacher don’t always value one answer over another, the students always want a correct assumption.

By: Jason Dyer

Jason Dyer — Sun, 17 Apr 2011 03:43:21 +0000

Point being, with my approach you get both. You get the guessing, the intuition. You get the extra motivation (however slight) to figure out what’s concealed. And then you get the WTF moment, only it’s distributed across the entire class.

I get you. I just would rather trade off for the extra learning objective of students spotting errors in a natural scenario (which I feel is one of the primary reasons for all this “math education” stuff).

I’m also with Joshua in that the bonus multiplier for my students of thumbing it at The Man is high. I realize this may depend on your school environment.

By: Dan Meyer

Dan Meyer — Sun, 17 Apr 2011 03:17:08 +0000

Emily VA: Does it add anything to actual look up what the current employment figures for Romney’s company are? (Bain Capital: 375 according to their website http://www.baincapital.com/Team/Default.aspx

Yes! Big winner!

By: Emily VA

Emily VA — Sat, 16 Apr 2011 21:39:40 +0000

(1) When I used the State of the Union problem (/?p=9258) for a lesson, I did what Jason and Joshua suggested — gave the students the real thing, unedited, and asked them to think through what might be suspicious about it. It was interesting to hear them think about a host of interesting questions you could ask — for starters, you could think about countries other than the US and China in that example — before narrowing it down to the one I wanted them to focus on. I think both approaches have their place, depending on which skills you’re working on that day — skeptical consumption of media and prioritization of questions vs. specific mathematical reasoning for a given question.

(2) Does it add anything to actual look up what the current employment figures for Romney’s company are? (Bain Capital: 375 according to their website http://www.baincapital.com/Team/Default.aspx )

By: Joshua Schmidt

Joshua Schmidt — Sat, 16 Apr 2011 19:24:12 +0000

I still am with Jason, I don’t have the anticipation of the answer to this problem the way that I did before. However, once you get the students to fill out their answer, you get a really good argument on what defines “hundreds”. It’s obvious Stewart’s answer is exaggerated at the very least, but I have a group of students who would rather prove an expert wrong than simply get their own answer correct.

Plus, I love the moment to play the entire clip and say, “What do you think?” It’s better than me giving them the question. While some other classrooms have students who are ready to create their own questions with WCYDWT, mine are not. We are creative infants, and I like the baby steps of this problem.

By: Dan Meyer

Dan Meyer — Sat, 16 Apr 2011 15:38:05 +0000

Jason: To me the main interest in the clips (especially the second one for a stats class) is spotting there’s a problem in the first place, not in the mathematics.

You still get that WTF moment, though. You get it after the students have worked out the answer, justified their work to each other, and they're ready for catharsis ... that doesn't come. You're flipping the confidence of the entire class around on itself. You're aren't just making an appeal to the few students who spotted the discrepancy in advance. Point being, with my approach you get both. You get the guessing, the intuition. You get the extra motivation (however slight) to figure out what's concealed. And then you get the WTF moment, only it's distributed across the entire class.

Jason: ... I, personally, have no anticipation of ‘what was in the bleep?’ the same way some other WCYDWTs affect me.

I agree. This is a separate, lower class of WCYDWT problem, meant only to upgrade this textbook problem:

If Mitt Romney created 200 jobs in 26 years, how long would it take him to create 20 million jobs?

Which isn't to say there aren't better ways to upgrade it than others.

By: Jason Dyer

Jason Dyer — Fri, 15 Apr 2011 15:18:38 +0000

In the particular case of the Stewart clips you aren’t hiding the answer, even; you’re hiding the fact that the show got the wrong answer. To me the main interest in the clips (especially the second one for a stats class) is spotting there’s a problem in the first place, not in the mathematics.

Regarding the general idea of removing information: clearly the answer going to have to get left out in any problem. It’s just a matter of if the answer is a natural thing to remove in the context. The tickets don’t bother me (one could always take the label off if it was a problem) but adding a gap to an audio track does.

Perhaps a better comparison would be with your Office video involving the bouncing cube. By stopping the video before the answer is revealed, you’re realistically placing the student in the scenario of being the character in the story in anticipation; that’s fine. If for some reason the answer was shown in the middle of the story and a blur was required, the immersion element is removed and the feel of realism is broken.

In essence you’re trying to create a storytelling-type anticipation among the students based on either “what just happened” or “what will happen next”? Forming a gap in the middle with a bleep just strikes me as an artificial way of doing it (at least I, personally, have no anticipation of ‘what was in the bleep?’ the same way some other WCYDWTs affect me).

By: Joshua Schmidt

Joshua Schmidt — Fri, 15 Apr 2011 03:03:26 +0000

You know I hadn’t thought about the idea of this being in the context of an entire curriculum. Simply put, if you reveal this answer, but you don’t reveal the previous answers gives away the fact that the answer itself is incorrect (or mostly incorrect in the Romney example). However, there is a certain level of intrigue in proving authority figures wrong (teachers or John Stewart) that make students feel smart. Maybe I won’t get the desired outcome immediately, but I feel that the cost benefit analysis of boosting student ego is sometimes worth the loss of the authenticity of the creation of the math.

I think it’s interesting to talk about the “reveal” of the answer not being able to be messed with. To be honest, your teaching style totally discredits that. You have already messed with the video itself, you have been doing it for the entire year (depending when you do this video), by video editing. A video with a hidden reveal is altered, just like your jump shot videos are altered. If you leave the video as is, then the students are creating a answer to a question that they have to create. If you create the reveal, the students already know the question, they are only searching for an answer, which creates a more linear problem. However, you are absolutely correct in that this is NOT the same as a student who sits as home watching the entire show (which is what I am always hoping to emulate) where they would question in context. However, I don’t have any ideas on how to handle that currently.