Geometry, McDougal-Littell.

Pseudocontext

Brian Miller:

Context should add something to the problem, whether it be intrigue, interest, or a way for students to pull from their intuition, and prior knowledge. It is the absence of reaching these measures, that makes me characterize this problem as pseudocontext. No student is going to read about the daffodil logo, and then feel compelled in anyway to prove the leaves to be at congruent angles.

This particular problem became more interesting after I took away the context. That could become another measure of how we judge context v. pseudocontext. Is the problem more interesting after the context has been stripped away? If so, then the context was actually pseudocontext.

Transcription:

You are designing a logo to sell daffodils. Use the information given. Determine whether the measure of angle EBA is equal to the measure of angle DBC.

Assignment:

1. Scan an example of pseudocontext.
2. Email it to dan@mrmeyer.com
3. List the textbook title, edition, and publisher.
4. Give me your interpretation of the term “pseudocontext.”
5. Let me know if you’d like credit (name, blog or twitter) or if you’d prefer anonymity.

Gail, blowing my mind:

This is what textbooks publishers and teachers seem to think is an authentic way to address the struggles of First Nations students (and other ethnic groups) with mathematics. It is important that students be able to “see” themselves in the resources and in the classroom, but the assumption is that this picture, with the highly culturally-stripped question, is somehow worth a check mark in that column. There is great significance in the dance, the dress, and even what the jingles might be made of, yet none of that is mentioned. Instead, all that’s done with it is to make an excuse for doing some Western mathematics.

Tyler Rice, likewise:

A majority of my students are American Indian. Many of them do travel to pow-wows and participate — some dance jingle. I know them well enough to guess what their reaction to this would be. They are culturally savvy enough to see when someone is “culture dropping.” Believe me, I tried it a few times my first couple of years. Can you say lead balloon? My guess is that this would actually be more of a distraction for my students than anything. In fact, some might find it mildly offensive in that a textbook has taken something culturally significant and distilled it down to “who has more cones?”

Pseudocontext is always an unforced error. Math, itself, is always available for context.

Foundations and Pre-Calculus – Mathematics 10, Pearson.

Pseudocontext

John Scammell [twitter, blog] via e-mail:

I suppose they think it is contextually brilliant because they supported it with a pretty picture. My two questions are, “Who cares?” and “Why don’t they just count if they care so much?”

Me:

Great problem. I wonder if “Who cares?” is a good lamp for guiding our curriculum design, though. There will always be students who don’t care, because engagement is relative. The part that strikes me about the problem is that you could replace “cones” with any random unit, or even gibberish, and it wouldn’t diminish the relative engagement of the problem one bit, from student to student, because there isn’t anything inherent to those cones that leads to that system of equations.

At this point, I have a lot of submissions I can’t (yet) post because I can’t personally prosecute the charge of pseudocontext. You need to convince me. I’m relying on you all to make the case for or against pseudocontext in your e-mails and in the comments. And definitely check out Ben Blum-Smith’s recent description of the term.

Transcription:

Talise folded 545 metal lids to make cones for jingle dresses for herself and her younger sister. Her dress had 185 more cones than her sister’s dress. How many cones are on each dress?

Assignment:

1. Scan an example of pseudocontext.
2. Email it to dan@mrmeyer.com
3. List the textbook title, edition, and publisher.
4. Give me your interpretation of the term “pseudocontext.”
5. Let me know if you’d like credit (name, blog or twitter) or if you’d prefer anonymity.

Intriguing Mathematical Problems, Dover Publications.

Pseudocontext

Ali Muñiz:

I like this one for its sheer density of wrongness. In less than twenty words we get three notions that would be ridiculous in a real context: That the narrator would have a favorite orange, that we have to solve a contrived word problem to find its weight, and, the punchline, once we solve it, that this “orange” weighs nine pounds.

Transcription:

My favorite orange weighs nine-tenths of its weight plus nine-tenths of a pound. What does it weigh?

Assignment:

1. Scan an example of pseudocontext.
2. Email it to dan@mrmeyer.com
3. List the textbook title, edition, and publisher.
4. Give me your interpretation of the term “pseudocontext.”
5. Let me know if you’d like credit (name, blog or twitter) or if you’d prefer anonymity.

2013 Jun 26. See every edition of Pseudocontext Saturdays.

I’m in the middle of Jo Boaler’s What’s Math Got To Do With It? when she drops the term “pseudocontext.” It’s great:

Instead of giving students realistic situations that they could analyze, textbook authors began to fill books with make-believe contexts – contexts that students were meant to believe but for which they should not use any of their real-world knowledge. Students are frequently asked to work on questions involving, for example, the price of food and clothes, the distribution of pizza, the numbers of people who can fit into an elevator, and the speeds of trains as they rush toward each other, but they are not meant to use any of their actual knowledge of clothing prices, people, or trains. Indeed, if they do engage in the questions and use their real-world knowledge, they will fail. Students come to know this about math class. They know that they are entering a realm in which common sense and real-world knowledge are not needed.

We need to call pseudocontext out when we see it, call it out by name. If we invite pseudocontext in our classrooms without condition, it becomes harder and harder to tell the difference between the real and the unreal. It becomes easier to excuse all kinds of bizarre unreality because, well, I mean, this is math class and in math class it’s possible to know that “in January of the year 2000, I was one more than eleven times as old as my son William while in January of 2009, I was seven more than three times as old as him” and yet not know how old your own son is.

This site even admits:

Obviously, in “real life” you’d have walked up to my kid and and asked him how old he was …

Then don’t pretend this is real life, okay, because everyone loses here. Students and teachers are alienated from mathematics and from each other.

[BTW: To clarify, the fact that you can just ask the kid’s age doesn’t indicate pseudocontext here so much as the fact that there’s nothing inherent to age that would lead you to the equation “E = 11W + 1.”]

Assignment:

1. Scan an example of pseudocontext.
2. Email it to dan@mrmeyer.com
3. List the textbook title, edition, and publisher.
4. Let me know if you’d like credit (name, blog or twitter) or if you’d prefer anonymity.