Great question, Samantha.

It’s interesting to me that the same task can be humanizing or dehumanizing depending on the teacher’s pedagogy.

The Barbie Bungee task can ask students to do routine cognitive work, making measurements, filling out boxes, performing operations, etc.

Does your implemenation of the task instead invite students to make novel contributions to the class’s understanding of mathematics or the context? Does it make room for intuition and early ideas about math? Does it give students a chance to think about how they’d make a confident prediction about the number of bands or does it prescribe a method which students will follow step-by-step? Different teachers of the barbie bungee task will answer this question in very different ways!

Here is a resource I made that might support a humanizing introduction of the problem. I hope you’ll let us know how the task goes for you.

I agree with you so much. Another aspect is to think about those students during their first years. I don’t know about you but I would be an absolute mess. Those students would be their guinea pigs for the year.

Why do you think teachers that never show you how to do anything and give you gentle hints is so effective? A past teacher I had in college followed that method and all it did was waste time and frustrate everyone especially when she moved on when some people still didn’t understand what was going on.

Over the past few years I have tried to help other teachers, similar to those mentioned in this article, develop into better math teachers. I’ve tried to support their mathematical understanding, and also help them to develop better questioning techniques. I’ve become a Cambridge Math Teacher Trainer, been department head, held tutoring sessions for teachers, and run workshops at MEAD (where you’ll be the keynote speaker this year!).

One of the recurring hurdles these teachers face is confidence. They don’t really understand the math and they often lack the confidence to execute things like you mentioned with the pile of bricks. That lack of confidence isn’t limited to just teachers that don’t know the math well. New teachers have a terribly difficult time because it is often against what is seen as best practice.

The support and focus from administration and school districts continues to be on resources and curriculum, not instructional techniques. So unless these teachers are mighty resources, and perhaps also willing to fight the man (stand up to administrative pressure), it is unlikely their students will realize successful outcomes.

This has perhaps been a tangential rant, I had a lot to get off of my chest, but here’s my conclusion. I think to move forward in the direction you are promoting (and I’m 100% on board), we need to educate the gate-keepers of education about what good math instruction, especially grades 6 – 12, is and what it is not.

But to your point that math should be taught like the humanities, I find that interesting. We struggle with the same debate in social studies to some extent, and there are plenty of classroom teachers who think that history and historical facts have some kind of intrinsic value. But whether it’s math or social studies, we ought to be teaching those discrete, objective things so that they can use them to think about the world in new ways. This reminds me of one of my favorite ideas from Paulo Freire – you learn to read the word in order to read the world.

It might be helpful for us to think about the humanity of an educational experience as a continuous variable rather than binary. A binary variable invites us to find exceptions and try to push an experience from one category to the other. What I’m saying is that both the textbook activity on compound prisms and the recitation of facts and dates invites a much narrower range of expression from a student than the counterexamples I’m offering. My goal isn’t to justify the former experience as “not really all that bad,” but to ask “how can I broaden the expression as much as possible here?”

Beautiful story, Jackie. I hope you’ve had a similar effect on your partner.