Top Chef. Project Runway. The Voice. Live competition shows have introduced audiences to the worlds of cooking, fashion, and singing – and opened a window into the intricate craftsmanship that these industries demand. Now it’s time for one of America’s most under-recognized professions to get the same treatment. Hi, teachers!!

Two teams of math teachers will teach a lesson to a live audience and receive judgment from a panel of “teacher celebrities.”

I linked to that description on Twitter and people were unsparing in their criticism:

There is so much more to teaching than what is viewable in a short lesson presented to a group of individuals. Connections with students matter.

I fear this will perpetuate false ideas of what teaching entails. https://t.co/5QUB6yo80M

— Lisa Bejarano (@lisa_bej) December 31, 2017

My mind is spinning with all the reasons why I think this is an awful idea. https://t.co/99X9owPAPk

— Marilyn Burns (@mburnsmath) December 31, 2017

Seems to me about as wise as a televised, competitive Parent Off. [Which is to say: Unwise.]

— Benjamin Dickman (@benjamindickman) December 31, 2017

Goodness. This is describably horrific.

Singing and “chef”ing (different from cooking) are performative arts centered on the entertainer.

Teaching must always be about helping the students grow. Not about judging the entertainer aspects of the instructor.

— Ben Wichser (@BenWichser) December 31, 2017

Teaching is and should always be a collaborative endeavor. Competition is what causes rifts among staff, encourages teaching in silos, and prevents us from growing together.

— Mike Flynn (@MikeFlynn55) December 31, 2017

I agree with the spirit of those criticisms, and David Coffey’s in particular:

Also, much of @Chalkbeatâ€s “craft of teaching” occurs under the surface. #TeachingLearningCycle pic.twitter.com/wKi3Feqne5

— David Coffey, Ph.D. (@delta_dc) December 31, 2017

Good teaching requires complicated decision-making based on a teacher’s long-range knowledge of a student and of mathematics. We should reach for any opportunity to make those decisions transparent to the public, who will always benefit from more education about good education. But a live event with an audience you don’t know and can’t interact with individually will necessarily flatten “teaching” down to its most presentational aspects, down to teachers dressing up in costumes, down to Robin Williams standing on desks in Dead Poets Society.

I asked teachers what kind of TV show would do justice to the complexity of teaching, if The Voice and Top Chef were the wrong models. Jamie Garner and James Cleveland both suggested The Real World, which seems dead on to me.

Rather than a game show, I envision that it would be more like The Real World: Math Class. This would allow for a development over time of understanding of the work of a classroom, not in one hour segments focused on competition. 1/2

— Jamie Garner (@mavenofmath) December 31, 2017

The Real World a) isn’t a competition, b) allows for characters to develop over time, and crucially, c) isn’t a live event. It is edited. You don’t watch the cast members do anything mundane. In the case of teaching, we’d love for the public to understand that good teachers assess what students know and adjust their instruction in response. But no one wants to watch a class work quietly on a five-minute exit ticket in real time. So the show would edit quickly past students completing the assessment and straight to the teacher trying to make sense of a student’s thinking, involving the audience in that process.

The challenge I’d like to see the folks at Chalkbeat take up is how to make those invisible aspects of teaching — the work that takes place after the bell — visible to the public. The work of presenting is already teaching’s most visible aspect.

BTW. Jamie Garner expands on The Real World: Math Class.

2018 Jan 1. Chalkbeat’s Editor-in-Chief, Elizabeth Green, clarifies her rationale for launching the competition and responds to some concerns raised here and on Twitter. She describes lesson study as the touchstone for her Teach Off and how she’s had to alter that format to fit SXSW.

It’s a really interesting article, full of references to the education scholars who have inspired her work for a decade. But I still tend to think she and the members of her design team have underestimated the magnitude of those compromises and how they’ll distort the approximation of good instruction her audience will encounter.

2018 Jan 8. In a revised contest page the organizers have eliminated the competition and clarified other aspects.

Featured Comment

Organizer Elizabeth Green weighs in:

I’m weighing in late here, but in response to one of the above threads, we never intended to have the whole audience serve as the students. As we’ve clarified in our revised page, which has more specific language, we’ll have 7-10 adult audience volunteers serve as students. Imperfect as a representation, for sure, but we still think everyone will get something important out of the 20-minute instructional activity + the followup discussion — that “something important” being better understanding about the nature of teaching and math teaching in particular. And for the record, Dan, at the 1,000-person “Iron Chef”-style teach off in Japan that Akihiko described, the students were the teacher’s actual students, and they all sat onstage.

The Judges

• Malke Rosenfeld, who uses dance and choreography to explore mathematical thinking.
• George Hart, a research mathematician who also sculpts using geometry as his medium.
• Michael Serra, author of Discovering Geometry, a geometry textbook infused from the front cover to the back with Michael’s love for math and art.

Five Finalists

Autumn, from Angela Ensminger’s class:

Theo, from Alice Hsiao’s class:

Trish Kreb’s seventh grade student:

John Grade & his daughter:

Maddie Bordelon and her math art team, “Right Up Left Down”:

[BTW. In an early draft of this post, I reversed the second and third prize winners. Mistakes were made. Apologies have been issued.]

Third Prize

Third prize, which is a medium-intensity high five delivered if we ever meet, and one copy of Weltman’s book, goes to Maddie Bordelon and her math art team, “Right Up Left Down.”

Second Prize

Second prize, which is sustained applause in a crowded, quiet room, and five copies of Weltman’s book, goes to Theo from Alice Hsiao’s class:

One judge wrote:

[E] completely holds my attention. The coloring choices pull me in and highlight the patterns and structure in a way that fascinates me. The long bands of white, blue and grey make a fantastic contrast to the brighter colors closer to the middle, which are also the shorter segments in the design. And, the bold outlines pull out the structure even more. I don’t know if it was intentional, but the overall effect of hand-coloring plus scanning the image made for a lovely final effect.

First Prize

First prize, which is 40 copies of Anna Weltman’s awesome book, goes to John Grade & his daughter.

[2015 Oct 12. John Grade is graciously passing his first prize down to the second prize winner.]

Our judges wrote about John Grade’s loop-de-loop:

It is very well constructed, brilliant use of color, and the number pattern chosen is pretty special.

A nice experiment to try Pi and see if a visible pattern emerges.

Congratulations, everybody.

Honorable Mention

I loved seeing students conjecturing mathematically about loop-de-loops, asking each other which ones converge and diverge, trying to predict the patterns they’d find in different strings of numbers. (See: Denise Gaskin’s comment for one example.)

Also, The Nerdery really sank its teeth into this assignment. This blog’s collection of programmer-types produced some great loop-de-loop visualizations:

• Josh G. used Scratch to let you manipulate every loop-de-loop of length three. (See also Scott Farrar with Geogebra; Jacob Klein with Desmos.)
• Dan Anderson used Processing to draw every loop-de-loop of length five.
• Joshua Green used PencilCode to let you draw non-rectangular loop-de-loops.
• Finally, Chris Lusto dazzled us with his “loop laboratory.” Great instructional design. No restrictions on the length of your loop-de-loop. Make sure you click through to screen 10.

You should buy Anna Weltman’s new math book, This is not a Math Book.

You should buy several, probably, for all the little people in your life who are deciding right now what they think about math and what math thinks about them. If they’re taking their cues on that decision from someone who dislikes math or who dislikes little people, consider using This is not a Math Book for counterweight.

You’ll find dozens of pages of math art, math sketches, math reasoning, and math whimsy. I read it in one sitting outside a coffee shop one afternoon, big dumb smile on my face the whole time. Actually finishing the book, fully participating in Weltman’s assignments of creativity and invention, will take many more afternoons.

I’d like to send one of you a class set of Weltman’s book. Here is how you get it:

• I love Weltman’s Loop-de-Loop assignment. It lends itself to some of my favorite mental mathematical acts around prediction, sequencing, transformation, and questions like “what if?” So you or your students or all of the above should make an awesome Loop-de-Loop. (Here is Weltman’s instruction page and her student work page, but any piece of graph paper will work.)
• Scan and send it to ddmeyer+loop@gmail.com.
• I’ll pick my five favorites and ask some of my favorite math artist friends to pick the winner from those five. Winner takes all, which is to say 40 copies of This is not a Math Book, from me to you.
• Contest ends 10/6 at 11:59 PM Pacific Time.

Drawings, color, character work, mixed media, it’s all fair game. I can’t wait.

BTW. Over the next several days, Weltman is blogging interesting questions to ask your students about Loop-de-Loops.

Featured Tweets

@ddmeyer can this be outsourced to a class and we send in our favorites?

— Jonathan (@rawrdimus) September 29, 2015

Yes, do that!

Students, we need to do this! See me if you're interested! (I already have the book — you need it in your life!) https://t.co/wOucB0Iq51

— Holly Werra (@MrsWerra) September 29, 2015

Yes, do that!

@ddmeyer @tchmathculture @AnnaWeltman How much do I love that a class set is 40 books? Thanks for the nod to the reality some of us face. :)

— Becca Phillips (@RPhillipsMath) September 29, 2015

Got your back.

BTW. 2007, 2008, 2009 (my favorite), 2010, 2011, 2012.

Because we’re keeping the activity available for you and your students to use as they study inequalities, we aren’t going to go into much depth on all the different rules contestants used. But I asked Rebecca how she came to her final, game-winning rule, and she told all:

My teacher first showed me the website, and I decided to try it out. My first attempt scored me only around 18%, but since hardly anyone had tried it out yet, I was ranked 33rd. After that, I was encouraged to try more equations, and suddenly thought of all the different types of equations that I could use, and moved to squared terms. One of the first equations that I came up with was b²>r²+g². I simply used trial and error to come up with new equations, and I recorded each equation that I used and the percentage. I combined different equations together, and a few different combinations even had the same percentage.

Nobody beat that.

Extra Credit: How many of the Standards of Mathematical Practice does Rebecca evoke in that quote?

There was probably some spittle involved.

Evan Weinberg posted “(Students) Thinking Like Computer Scientists” a month ago and the lesson idea haunted me since. It realizes the promise of digital, networked math curricula as well as anything else I can point to. If math textbooks have a digital future, you’re looking at a piece of it in Evan’s post.

Evan’s idea basically demanded a full-scale Internetization so I spent the next month conspiring with Evan and Dave Major to put the lesson online where anybody could use it.

That’s Do You Know Blue?

Five Reasons To Love This Lesson

It’s so easy to start. While most modeling lessons begin by throwing information and formulas and dense blocks of text at students, Evan’s task begins with the concise, enticing, intuitive question “Is this blue?” That’s the power of a digital math curriculum. The abstraction can just wait a minute. We’ll eventually arrive at all those equations and tables and data but we don’t have to start with them.

Students embed their own data in the problem. By judging ten colors at the start of the task, students are supplying the data they’ll try to model later. That’s fun.

It’s a bridge from math to computer science. Students get a chance to write algorithms in a language understood by both mathematicians and the computer scientists. It’s analogous to the Netflix Prize for grown-up computer scientists.

It’s scaffolded. I won’t say we got the scaffolds exactly right, but we asked students to try two tasks in between voting on “blueness” and constructing a rule.

1. They try to create a target color from RGB values. We didn’t want to assume students were all familiar with the decomposition of colors into red, green, and blue values. So we gave them something to play with.
2. They guess, based on RGB values, if a color will be blue. This was instructive for me. It was obvious to me that a big number for blue and and little numbers for red and green would result in a blue color. I learned some other, more subtle combinations on this particular scaffold.

This is the modeling cycle. Modeling is often a cycle. You take the world, turn it into math, then you check the math against the world. In that validation step, if the world disagrees with your model, you cycle back and formulate a new model.

My three-act tasks rarely invoke the cycle, in contrast to Evan’s task. You model once, you see the answer, and then you discuss sources of error. But Evan’s activity requires the full cycle. You submit your first rule and it matches only 40% of the test data, so you cycle back, peer harder at the data, make a sharper observation, and then try a new model.

The contest is running for another five days. The top-ranked student, Rebecca Christainsen, has a rule that correctly predicts the blueness of 2,309 out of 2,594 colors for an overall accuracy of 89%. That’s awesome but not untouchable. Get on it. Get your students on it.

a/k/a A Netflix Prize for K-12 Math Students
a/k/a Let Dave Major, Evan Weinberg, and Me Buy Your Class A Pizza Party

Can you teach a computer to recognize the color “blue”? Head to Do You Know Blue? and find out. If you do the best job teaching the computer, we’ll send your class a pizza party in appreciation.

Enter the contest as many times as you want. Come back and check out your standing at this page.

You have until Monday 5/27 at 7:00AM Pacific Time.

Disclaimers

• Anybody can participate but the winning entrant will need to be a K-12 student in the US.
• $100 maximum on the pizza party.
• You’ll have to include an e-mail address, school name, and teacher name if you want to compete for the pizza party.
• If multiple people take the top spot we’ll draw the winner randomly

As far as I’m concerned, MTT2K has brought all kinds of good to the world.

I’d like to see some more of the kind of engagement we saw this last week, the kind where online criticism turns into improved outcomes for millions of students in the span of 24 hours. I’m excited to see what comes of this.

1. Frieder Knauss

I can add very little to the appreciation circulating on this site except to say that Mr. K manages the hat trick of a) personal retrospection, b) data design, and (the rarity) c) editorial.

That he does this in several thousand fewer pixels than all of his competitors is to his credit, as is the vomit-themed color palette which he somehow sells as an element of his NCLB nausea.

2. Sam Shah

That Sam didn’t place speaks to the overall quality of the entire slate. From fonts to colors to axes and grids, none of his design choices cohere. Yet he tosses them all on the same wall with a stuffed buck and the whole thing looks like some kind of genius aneurysm. The herkyjerky, undistributed, unaligned tabs on his “Blog Hits” slide are a particular high point for me.

An appreciation by Ben Wildeboer:

Simon Job knows what he’s doing. First he grabs my attention by plastering his first slide with pictures of his adorable new baby and then goes on to use his four slides to tell a compelling story of his new life with his new daughter. I can sense the major changes his life has undergone after the birth of his first child through the information contained in his annual report- the photo sharing with family & friends, the frequent doctor visits, new sounds in his house, and the unenviable task of changing all those “nappies.” Print out that Nappies slide and post it in every sex ed. classroom and it’d probably do more to prevent teen pregnancy than any method currently in use. The fusion of good, simple design around a coherent storyline made Simon Job’s annual report stick out in my mind above all the rest. Of course, it could just be those adorable baby pictures.