dy/dan

Subscribe

Join 30K+ other people in receiving Dan's monthly updates on innovations, ideas, and news in math education.

Category: conferences

Total 78 Posts

Asilomar #7: Excel

By • December 2, 2007 • 4 Comments

Session Title

“Algebra Techniques Using an Excel Spreadsheet”

Presenter

Chris Mackenzie. Teacher, Palomar Valley High School.

Narrative

This guy has pitched a tent in the SCUD missile-marked territory between me and Christian Long. I suspect Christian would’ve enjoyed this guy’s unabashed amateurism, how he acknowledged at the start that he was just a teacher, not an expert, that he just really liked Excel’s applications for Algebra. When anyone corrected his math or technique, he’d say “You’ve discovered one of my weaknesses” or “Wow. That is a really good question.”

I was blogging inside of fifteen minutes, as soon as it became clear he wasn’t going to teach us anything. We were just going to talk, one amateur to a bunch of others.

Maybe this is only me but I would have been entirely unoffended had he baldly asserted his expertise and taught me how to make some of his dazzling โ€“ truly dazzling โ€“ Excel spreadsheets, with sliders that controlled variables which manipulated some beautiful graphs.

But in one-and-a-half hours I learned one Excel term (“CONCATENATE”).

That’s all.

Presentation Notes

He would open up Excel file after Excel file and demonstrate their operation but not their construction. For ninety minutes. He chided those of us who had opened up unrelated browser windows but, I mean, come on: if your kids are bored in class, is that their fault? Or yours.

Homeless

Testaments to advance planning: his laptop’s hard drive failed the day before and he didn’t anticipate that every computer in the lab would be running Vista and Office 2007. Whoops.

Sufficient Megapixels

For Your Consideration

Nixon’s the one. Vote dy/dan best new edublog and best individual edublog.

Asilomar #6: PowerPoint

By • December 2, 2007 • 3 Comments

Session Title

“Beginning Math Lesson Delivery by PowerPoint and Tablet PCs”

Presenter

George Krukis. Teacher, Lodi High School.

Narrative

I figured I oughtta attend since I’ll be stealing this guy’s slot next year. I felt a little guilty afterward, though, ’cause Krukis and I have a lot in common.

  • We are both designers by necessity, not by training.
  • We both use PowerPoint everyday. (Keynote in my case.)
  • We both run through a thousand slides in a school year and both find our thousandth slide far superior to our first.
  • We both use PowerPoint’s animation (and Keynote’s builds) to help us recall the pacing and structure of a lesson year after year.
  • We both dig how you can strengthen a slide slightly after each delivery and how those fortifications are preserved and compounded year after year.
  • We both acknowledge that PowerPoint is a means, not an end.

There are many significant differences between us, though.

  • He wasn’t using a wireless remote. One of the best parts of projecting images onto a wall is untethering yourself from the whiteboard (this has some cool implications for classroom management, which I’ll get to eventually) but Krukis untethered himself from the whiteboard only to re-tether himself to a laptop four feet in front of it. Whoops.
  • We both recognize the power in a standardized PowerPoint template, though, for Krukis it’s a matter of time saved where for me, it’s a matter of decreasing cognitive load.
  • He uses clip-art. I use photographs. Clip-art is dead.
  • While I think he fully appreciates how helpful PowerPoint can be in small ways, day-in, day-out, I don’t think he appreciates the damage small things (like light green text on a purple background) can inflict over a year.
  • If he’s heard of (pick any three) Reynolds, Tufte, Kawasaki, McLuhan, or Abela, I’ll eat my conference badge. Fact is, a little graphic design instruction goes a long way to improve clarity in the classroom, a fact which I’ll exploit next year.

Presentation Notes

I think we can all agree you’d better have your presentation game right if you’re gonna talk about PowerPoint. In spite of his obvious, better-than-average facility with the medium, dude loaded his slides with a lot of text which he read word for word, a fact which alone is a disqualifier in my book. He’s got enthusiasm in the right places but he hasn’t reached out far enough for free and available expert advice. (cf. amateurs & experts.)

Homeless

  • He’d take screenshots from movies and insert math-related thought- or word-bubbles. That was cool, fun, worth stealing.
  • There was a guy in the second row so enthusiastic (murmuring, yeah, mm, yeah, that’s cool, hey that’s great) he could’ve been a plant. (Note to self: recruit a plant next year.)
  • Song of the session: “Girl From The North Country,” Bob Dylan, which is probably the only Dylan song I’ve played more times than never. After the session, on the way to lunch, some lady half my height and twice my age struck up a conversation and sang all three verses of a parody she wrote to satirize her remedial math kids. Weird.
  • Recovered my appetite and enjoyed chicken thai salad with the rest of the SLV math team. Good times.

Sufficient Megapixels

For Your Consideration

Prosperity for the edublogosphere’s families. Vote dy/dan best new edublog and best individual edublog.

Asilomar #5: Hooks

By • December 2, 2007 • 1 Comment

Session Title

“Six Golden Opportunities to Interest Your Students in Mathematics”

Presenter

Jenny Holmstrom. Teacher, Sumner High School.

Narrative

These grab bag events, the sort where a presenter opens her bag of tricks all over the floor for us to sift through, can get really weird real fast. They’re more literally self-centered than other presentation memes but this was a good one.

“Golden opportunities” I remember:

  • She walked around and shook a handful of change in our ears. We had to guess a) how many coins she had, b) what they were, and c) how much they were worth. Lots of loud guessing.

    Then she had us pick a number and run through an algorithm, the sort that eventually has you “now subtract your original number” so you can control the result, and get 2.5

    What’s 2.5 mean, do you think? Lots said two-and-a-half dimes, or 25 cents. Turns out she had two and a half pennies. Big laugh.

    She repeated the whole process with more and more varied denominations.

  • Tell your audience there were five graduates from the Geology department in 1985 at the University of North Carolina. Guess their average salary.

    We all guessed mid- to high five figures. Answer was $4.9 million (big gasp) because one of them was Michael Jordan.

    Oughtta check all those numbers out but, regardless of my hazy memory, it’s a good intro to “median.”

  • Can you cut a hole in an index card large enough for you to crawl through? (A: Yes, yes you can.)
  • She put up a population list of towns in her area and their growth rates (from the census, I guess). There was everything from small towns with large growth rates to huge towns with small growth rates. How long will it take the smallest town to catch up to the largest town?
  • Play a zillion games of Roshambo. Record the results. Determine, using basic probability, if the game is fair or if you skew an advantage toward yourself. (A: Yes, yes you can.)

There’s more but the day’s unrelenting math math math has sucked me dry. None of these are anything to build a full unit out of, they’re just really sturdy ways to finish up a period or plug a hole in your week.

Presentation Notes

Acetane transparencies again. I’ve decided I prefer overhead projectors ten times out of ten to someone who jams bullet points into a single PowerPoint slide. You won’t write small on transparencies. Transparencies keep you honest.

Homeless

  • Song of the day: “Tranquilize,” The Killers feat. Lou Reed
  • A strange crowd assembled (spontaneously) for this one: Tim, my old department head from Sacramento, and Sabrina and Jen, from UC Davis. Each of us had heard the other had died in some freak car accident outside Cholame so catching up was fun.
  • I brought a stack of Graphing Stories with me on DVD. I introduce myself and pass ’em out to seatmates, presenters, the dude watching me blog right now in Merrill Hall, etc. I try to be real unpushy about it, real secure, like, “I’d be real honored if you’d have a look sometime.”

More Megapixels Please:

For Your Consideration:

A kinder, gentler nation. Vote dy/dan best new edublog and best individual edublog.

Asilomar #4: Friday Keynote

By • December 2, 2007 • 12 Comments

Session Title

“‘Don’t Smile Until Christmas’ and Other Teaching Myths”

Presenter

Gary Tsuruda. Retired Teacher, Palo Alto USD. Finalist, Presidential Teaching Award for Mathematics and Science.

Narrative

Didn’t do much for me but from the standpoint of a conference organizer it was probably perfectly selected.

We were all piled into a middle school auditorium โ€“ beginners, veterans, math degrees, multiple-subject credentials, high school, elementary โ€“ so Tsuruda had to pitch the talk straight down the middle, no curve whatsoever.

The myths cited, then, were either obvious (turns out you can smile before Christmas), pandering (turns out teachers don’t have it easy), or plainly false (turns out creativity and NCLB are mutually exclusive).

Lots of cheering, lots of quotes from historical/literary figures (I probably should’ve recognized) affirming the nobility and self-sacrifice of the teacher, standing ovation at the end, all kinda highlighting what, as of this posting, no longer surprises me: I just don’t get these people.

Presentation Notes

PowerPoint. (The giveaways, incidentally, are: white drop shadows, a limited color palette, a general flatness.) I’m really surprised by a particular innovation I’ve seen in two presentations here:

If the presenter has three bullet points (for example) she makes three identical slides but sets the text color of each bullet point that doesn’t matter to the background color leaving only a drop-shadow “ghost.” The result pulls your eyes to the current bullet point without fully erasing the rest.

Homeless

  • I addressed this idea that constraints are the enemy of creativity back when the University of Chicago asked its applicants for four static PowerPoint slides. To a vast extent, the opposite is true.
  • While Tsuruda spoke of our saintliness for accepting low pay, one woman in front of me whispered to another, “well we want to make sure people go into teaching for the right reasons.”

    I really don’t have words to describe how weird that attitude makes me feel. It gives me grounds to make a guarantee, though:

    If you expect people to get into teaching sacrificially, to begin and persist in this job for the passion and the joy of working with students, you will get workers who resent administrator observations, who eschew professional standards, who cling to tenure, and who promote this job as art.

    You won’t get teachers who embrace this job as a measurable, reproducible science, who believe that a teacher’s worth correlates strongly to her students’ achievement, or who recommend promoting and demoting teachers accordingly.

    America: you’ve gotta decide. If you want workers from category #2 (like me โ€“ there, I said it) you’ll have to give them a reason to begin, persist, and innovate in teaching beyond the joy of the job. If you want workers from category #1, it doesn’t seem sporting at all to treat them like they work in category #2.

For Your Consideration:

It’s morning again in America. Vote dy/dan best new edublog and best individual edublog.

Asilomar #3: Green Knowledge

By • December 2, 2007 • 9 Comments

Session Title

“Red Knowledge / Green Knowledge: A Different Way to Think about Teaching”

Presenter

Tom Sallee. Professor of Mathematics/Researcher, UC Davis.

Narrative

Man’s a titan. He was when I took him for Non-Euclidean Geometry at UC Davis and he was in the Sanderling Room today where he kept an audience rapt with only his measured cadence and an old-school overhead projector. Ninety minutes passed in what felt like ten.

He spoke of red knowledge and green knowledge, the red stuff being procedural/factual and the green stuff being conceptual. He distinguished them by saying that, with red knowledge, “you know whether or not you know it.”

“What’s 8 – 7?” vs. “How do you multiply two-digit numbers?”

“You’ll never hear me say conceptual knowledge and procedural knowledge aren’t both important,” he said. “That’s insane.” But he said he preferred conceptual knowledge because it gave him “a fighting chance” with a problem he’d never seen before.

“We tend to hide our best stuff from our students,” he said, “and I don’t know why.” He was referring to problem solving, honed intuition, creativity, etc.

I reckon this distinction is on the mind of anyone with a blog and of most people reading this. Implementation remains kinda fuzzy for all of us, though.

So the basics are these: during lecture he focuses almost exclusively on green knowledge and he puts it almost exclusively on them to pick up red knowledge independently, through the text.

He focuses each lecture on what he perceives are the largest ideas in calculus (for non-majors). For example:

To three decimal places find a number b such that:

He’ll give that to kids who don’t know L’Hôpital’s Rule, kids who barely know the definition of a limit and draw them around to the idea that you can drop that equation into Excel and get a decimal answer accurate to three, four, five, or fifty decimal places.

He did this for a semester and compared survey results with a willing red-knowledge colleague. The results were descriptive and I wish I could recall the exact wording. My strongest take-away was that, while both classes evinced intellectual laziness that kinda comes with the college freshman territory (laziness that’s kinda our fault in high school) Sallee’s kids were much less intimidated by a problem they didn’t know how to solve and more often felt like class time had been well spent.

Presentation Notes

Acetane transparencies never looked so fine. He’d scribble on a couple, leave ’em up for a few minutes, and then put a new one up. Maybe because it was the second half of the day, maybe because I’ve got a nerd crush on the guy, I don’t know, but I welcomed the lo-fi approach.

Homeless

  • Prefaced his talk with a two-minute summary so that anyone who wanted to bail could bail early rather than late. Classy.
  • Recommended reading: The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Thomas Kuhn.
  • Rick West: “If you copy an answer, you’ve rented knowledge, you haven’t bought it.”
  • He’s retiring this next year, which lent all kinds of urgency to his talk.
  • The best assignment he ever received at CalTech: a sheet with 100 problems about which the instructor said, “Find all the problems you can do and don’t do them. Find a problem you can’t do and do it.”

Sufficient Megapixels

For Your Consideration

Building a bridge to the 21st century. Vote dy/dan best new edublog and best individual edublog.

Unless otherwise noted, everything you and I post here is licensed
for reuse under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International.