In fairness, people hate math. Hollywood just turns on the cameras.

BTW. Here’s the behind-the-scenes. I went to SubZin, searched for “math,” crossed off the (few) movies that had anything positive or neutral to say on the subject, queued up all the other movies in NetFlix and ripped those scenes over the course of a few months. Then I wrote down all the lines and started moving them around like an essay. The supercut was easier to edit knowing I had some large passages where kids talked about flunking math or adults referred to their own trouble with math. I was also able to make the movies talk to each other, like the dialog between Jamie Lee Curtis and Megan Fox.

Featured Comments

Jennifer Ouellette:

Great supercut, but there are also Hollywood movies that celebrate math. A Beautiful Mind, Mean Girls, the TV series Numbers, Good Will Hunting… Maybe fodder for another supercut. :)

Barry Smith:

Mathematical genius appears in too many of those pro-math movies. Good Will Hunting, Numbers, Real Genius, Beautiful Mind – everyone watching those movies recognizes that the protagonists are far outside the norm.

Mr. K:

Worse yet, the math geniuses often aren’t even really doing math. They are math like Buck Rogers is science. Numb3rs is a particularly horrific example of this.

Ray O’Brien:

Yup, we are the academic equivalent of dentists.

@MatthewMaddux:

I disagree with the title. I suggest: Hollywood Hates [School] Math.

2013 Apr 24. Nick Douglas of the Slacktory as a nice rundown of the supercut business.

This is one of the most tragic math problems I’ve ever seen. (Click for larger.) Not because it’s awful, though it is, but because the awfulness conceals something amazing. I mean, how great is it that we can drop a rock in a well and the sound of the splash tells us how deep the well is. That’s wizardry!

I find it completely amazing we get to offer that power to our students. If my goal were to conceal that amazingness, though, to ensure my students would be less interested in mathematical wizardry thanks to my efforts, I’m not sure I could do any better than this problem.

Problems

1. The student experiences act one and act two at the same time. Act one is supposed to hit you in the gut; act two in the head. The only reason your textbook tries to do both at the same time is because printing the same problem on two different pages is logistically impossible. Luckily, you aren’t bound by the same constraints.
2. The problem starts in the second act. And what a second act. Your students have no idea why they’re wading through that long, thickety paragraph outlining the tools, information, and resources (act two) they’ll need to solve the hook (act one) which shows up long after they’ve stopped caring.
3. And what a hook. Seriously, could someone please explain to me which interest group or political constituency is served by slurring what should have been concise, obscuring what should have been clear, and jargoning what should have been conversational. Seriously, how would a human phrase that hook? Would a human need twenty-six words?
4. The act one visual is cheap. Again, we’re dealing with cheap clip art here only because of the constraints on an industry that’s taking on water. Don’t go down with that ship. Can you think of a better visual, one that would make students wonder, “Wow. How deep is that?” without you lifting a finger?
5. The act three payoff is weak. Imagine all the intensity of the final assault on the Death Star in Star Wars. A planet’s survival hinges on an unimaginably long shot. Luke takes that shot as the clock winds down, a shot right at the guts of the Death Star. What if at that moment we cut to some Rebellion functionary announcing in a slow monotone, “The Rebels were successful. They destroyed the Death Star.” That’s what it’s like to read the answer to a visually compelling problem in the back of the book. Show that thing explode.

Solutions

It turns out that Hollywood occasionally makes math problems for us. Click through and have a look.

1. Journey to the Center of the Earth (2008)
2. The Descent

With Brendan Fraser, you get a fun check on your own answer and an explanation of why his team even cares how deep the cave is. With the Descent team, you get a much deeper cave and a stronger separation between the first and second acts. Both represent massive improvements over our status quo.

To be clear, I’m not saying you can just play act one and two and your students will trot merrily to an answer in act three, deriving that thorny equation for projectile motion all on their own while stopping periodically to smell the constructivism flowers. I’m not saying that. This problem is tricky and will likely require lots of help on your part. What I’m saying for sure is that it makes no sense to offer that mountainous paragraph of helpful text without your students knowing (to say nothing of caring) why you’re offering it.

Related:

• The Three Acts of a Mathematical Story

Dan

Dan’s features a spigot leaking into a bucket. It’s just leaking. Drip drip drip drip drip.

Nancy

Nancy’s features a faucet leaking into a measuring cup. It’s just leaking. Drip drip drip drip drip. But Nancy also includes a timer on her iPhone. And at the end of 39 seconds she draws the measuring cup close to the camera so you can see how many ounces have leaked out so far.

Why Dan Has Told The Better Mathematical Story

The first act of a good story introduces a conflict. It does very little to solve it. Think of the shark in Jaws munching on the lady swimmer. At that point, we have no idea what tools, resources, and information will be brought to bear on the task of killing the shark. We only know we want it dead.

The first act of a good story asks very little of the viewer’s intellect. It appeals, instead, to the gut. The viewer of Nancy’s first act would ideally think, “My word. How much water is that faucet going to waste?” Instead, because Nancy has already foregrounded the tools, resources, and information that belong in the second act of the story (just several minutes later in the lesson!) the viewer thinks, “Oh. This is a math problem, isn’t it?”

We need to curb our natural tendency as math teachers to burn up interesting problems on an altar to our math gods. In this case, all that means is you wait until after your students have formulated a question that interests them before offering them tools, resources, and information to solve it.

BTW: Picky? Absolutely. But where’s the fun in this job if not in negotiating the details. For whatever it’s worth, if you called me out for featuring timers prominently in the first acts of my own stories (as Bowen Kerins did recently) you’d be right on. The timers came from a position of insecurity that no one’s going to wonder “how long?” if I don’t explicitly call out time in the first act. That’s done now.

2013 May 14. Here’s a brief series on how to teach with three-act math tasks. It includes video.

2013 Apr 12. I’ve been working this blog post into curriculum ideas for a couple years now. They’re all available here.

Storytelling gives us a framework for certain mathematical tasks that is both prescriptive enough to be useful and flexible enough to be usable. Many stories divide into three acts, each of which maps neatly onto these mathematical tasks.

Act One

Introduce the central conflict of your story/task clearly, visually, viscerally, using as few words as possible.

With Jaws your first act looks something like this:

The visual is clear. The camera is in focus. It isn’t bobbing around so much that you can’t get your bearings on the scene. There aren’t any words. And it’s visceral. It strikes you right in the terror bone.

With math, your first act looks something like this:

The visual is clear. The camera is locked to a tripod and focused. No words are necessary. I’m not saying anyone is going to shell out ten dollars on date night to do this math problem but you have a visceral reaction to the image. It strikes you right in the curiosity bone.

Leave no one out of your first act. Your first act should impose as few demands on the students as possible – either of language or of math. It should ask for little and offer a lot. This, incidentally, is as far as the #anyqs challenge takes us.

Act Two

The protagonist/student overcomes obstacles, looks for resources, and develops new tools.

Before he resolves his largest conflict, Luke Skywalker resolves a lot of smaller ones – find a pilot, find a ship, find the princess, get the Death Star plans back to the Rebellion, etc. He builds a team. He develops new skills.

So it is with your second act. What resources will your students need before they can resolve their conflict? The height of the basketball hoop? The distance to the three-point line? The diameter of a basketball?

What tools do they have already? What tools can you help them develop? They’ll need quadratics, for instance. Help them with that.

Act Three

Resolve the conflict and set up a sequel/extension.

The third act pays off on the hard work of act two and the motivation of act one. Here’s act three of Star Wars.

That’s a resolution right there. Imagine, though, that Luke fired his last shot and instead of watching the Death Star explode, we cut to a scene inside the Rebellion control room. No explosion. Just one of the commanders explaining that “the mission was a success.”

That what it’s like for students to encounter the resolution of their conflict in the back of the teacher’s edition of the textbook.

If we’ve successfully motivated our students in the first act, the payoff in the third act needs to meet their expectations. Something like this:

Now, remember Vader spinning off into the distance, hurtling off to set the stage for The Empire Strikes Back. You need to be Vader. Make sure you have extension problems (sequels, right?) ready for students as they finish.

Conclusion

Many math teachers take act two as their job description. Hit the board, offer students three worked examples and twenty practice problems. As the ALEKS algorithm gets better and Bill Gates throws more gold bricks at Sal Khan and more people flip their classrooms, though, it’s clear to me that the second act isn’t our job anymore. Not the biggest part of it, anyway. You are only one of many people your students can access as they look for resources and tools. Going forward, the value you bring to your math classroom increasingly will be tied up in the first and third acts of mathematical storytelling, your ability to motivate the second act and then pay off on that hard work.

Related

1. I gave this post a try a year ago.
2. Also, Breedeen Murray has a lot of useful things to say about storytelling, though I can’t endorse her enthusiasm for “confusion.”

2011 Dec 26: The Three Acts of a (Lousy) Mathematical Story is also on the syllabus.

Participant Media – Pledge To See This Film from CypherAudio on Vimeo.

Paperclip Challenge from Dan Meyer on Vimeo.

I’ve moved nearly a dozen times since I broke this record in 2004 and the tapes have followed me everywhere: 24 hours of non-stop monotonous paper clipping minus twelve gaps where one of my friends (probably Steve) changed the reels. Five minutes of this footage will make you sorry you ever spoke an unkind word about grass growing or paint drying, which are each several orders of magnitude more exciting than this.

So I compressed those 24 hours into three minutes, which meant transferring the footage from Hi-8 tapes to DV tapes (time cost: 24 hours) and then importing the DV tapes to Final Cut Pro (time cost: 24 hours). There were no shortcuts. The project took weeks.

I have only one creative note worth mentioning here, a footnote to my previous post, Don’t Let Your Students Use Music In Their Video Projects: the soundtrack is entirely ambient noise.

I worry about video teachers who would encourage the student to mute the ambient noise – the chaos, the laughter, the occasional grim silence, all of which is essential documentary detail – and instead apply a thick lacquer of Creative-Commons-licensed pop electronica. Something chosen carefully, no doubt. Something propulsive to match what passes for content here. But I’ll point out, again, that a) controlling ambient noise is its own necessary kind of skill, and b) laying a music track beneath a video track without worrying about how the two tracks play with each other – how the aural ebbs and flows with the visual – will strike certain segments of your audience as, artistically speaking, soulless.

This particular case is easy. If your audio track doesn’t shift gears or climax or do something at exactly one minute and 21 seconds into this video – when the sun rises – you’ve missed the moment and essentially filed for divorce on behalf of your audio and video track, citing irreconcilable differences.

Ponderosa Lodge 40th Anniversary Montage from Dan Meyer on Vimeo.

My first video project this summer was a montage celebrating the fortieth anniversary of a local camp. This was complicated. No video existed from the 1970s. I thought, initially, to interweave older photos and newer video but, instead, went strictly with photography.

This was also challenging. There is only so much you can do with still photos. You can cross fade them. You can apply filters. You can edit them to music. You can go the Animoto route. You can go the Ken Burns route. But those techniques do very little to enrich the content. Ken Burns enriches his photos, for instance, with research, narration, and editing. Without those, the motion across the screen would grow tiresome.

I took a familiar path. Several years ago I posted a photo montage that exists somewhere between 2D and 3D. The technique is straightforward.

You take as many photos of the scene as you need plates (or layers). You keep your camera in manual mode so that when you move subjects out of the way (to get an unobstructed shot of the background) the aperture doesn’t change.

In this case, I wanted a layer for each of the brothers and the background. You use the pen tool in Photoshop to cut out each plate from the background and then import the composited file (with three total layers, in this case) into Adobe AfterEffects where you tell your computer, this layer is closer to the camera, this one is farther away, here’s how to move the 3D camera around the scene. Once you outline your scenes, it’s only a question of how much free time you have for the digital carving.

This project was different. I couldn’t go back in time to shoot the two brothers separate from each other and from the background. I spent four hours scanning slides from the 1970s. After I masked the subject from the photo there was … nothing. Just white space. I had to guess at and then recreate the background.

So I got cozy with the clone tool, which is exceptionally easy to use poorly. As often as I could, I set myself up with subjects standing in front of solid colors or simple textures, which are easy to clone.

These two were especially difficult. The sandy ridge behind the campers is almost entirely fake. If you look closely at the pool photo, you’ll notice I had to clone an onlooker’s entire face.

I thought sand would be easier to clone but the light fell across it unevenly and had me pulling out tufts of hair trying to compensate. Stay away from sand.

It’s difficult to stretch a single technique across an entire film. It gets tired. So I waited to deploy that one until the bridge of the audio track kicked in. Beforehand and afterwards, I went for a ghostly, melancholy vibe with subjects drawn into the campground at the start and then drawn out at the end.

Which, again, required a lot of digital carving.

David Cox: What percentage of the population do you think has the eyes and/or ears to know the difference [between soundtracks done well and done poorly]? When I watch a movie or listen to a song, I don’t see the things that you see. I try, but I don’t understand why certain shots are done certain ways or why a particular piece of music was or wasn’t used. Can I learn that? I don’t know. But if my audience won’t know the difference, should I take the time to learn it?

Two incomplete thoughts:

1. The software programmer should not write your lesson plan.

The programmer cares about consumers, not students. The programmer’s job is to make as many features accessible to as many consumers as easily as possible, without glutting the program. Your job is to challenge your students. Your job is very, very different. So don’t feel weird telling kids not to use a) bullet points in PowerPoint, b) filters in Audacity, and c) the “Add Track From iTunes” button in iMovie. The existence of the button does not make good pedagogy out of the button.

2. To put students in a place to care about the difference between good and bad production and not to equip them is wrong.

Which is to say, if you don’t know why those closing montages at the end of Grey’s Anatomy and Lost are insipid shortcuts to genuine emotional interaction with a story, then you should have the humility to recuse yourself and say, “Maybe I’m the wrong person to teach students to make movies.”

This isn’t about amateurs and experts. That fight is over. The amateurs have won and I wouldn’t reverse that ruling if I could. But it’s extremely important to understand where teachers fit into the new creative structure, a structure which has seen the quantity of published media increase at the same pace as its median quality has declined.

We must act as bulwarks against that decline, not accelerants of it.

On the other hand, this strikes me as just another one of those tool that depends entirely on a teacher’s pre-existing digital storytelling skills but which also distracts her from developing those skills. (ie. Why learn how to make one video really well when you can put six average videos on a cube!)