I’m usually pretty immune to this sort of thing. I don’t want to dazzle my students with math. I want them to engage with math and sometimes the spectacle just intimidates them or makes math seem all the more foreign and unknowable.

Other times the spectacle is simply too spectacular not to share.

I teach Algebra 1 and Remedial Algebra 1, a schedule which offers me interesting contrasts and case studies daily. The remedial population, as you might expect, features more behavior problems, lower rates of attendance, higher mobility, higher incidence of poverty, weaker student skills, more individualized education plans on file with the district, and those students are more likely to have disliked math (or their math teacher) in the past. After three years of trial and error, I have found intermittently successful ways to remediate most of these issues.

The feature of this group that confounds me and defies my remediation is this: they are far less likely find our daily show and tell interesting than are their contemporaries in non-remedial Algebra.

What I’m saying is that, when I play, for example, this fantastic loop of time lapse photography, my Algebra 1 students sit a few millimeters closer to the edges of their seats and lean a few degrees closer to the screen than do my Remedial Algebra students. They call out observations and deconstruct the movie in ways the remedial classes do not anticipate. In general, they seem eager to engage the unknown whereas my Remedial Algebra students seem to prefer that the unknown stay unknown, that life’s unturned rocks stay unturned.

Pixel’s Revenge timelapse showreel from David Coiffier on Vimeo.

This bears out even between sections of the same course. The length of a class’ discussion of show and tell media correlates positively to the class’ average grade.

No pithy conclusion. I have no idea what I can do with this.

Killer concept and execution on this Cold War Kids video. You can activate/deactivate any instrument at any point in the song and change any musician to any one of four tracks.

I have no objection to loading this thing up after the opener exercises and simply playing with it. If the moment offered itself, though, I wouldn’t mind asking:

1. If we set all the tracks before the video starts, how many different videos could we watch?Further: the song is 3:10 long. If we started watching all of those videos right now, on what day and at what time would our marathon end?
2. How many times did each musician have to record the song?

The difference between those two numbers is staggering, worth classroom discussion, a sign of the times, etc.

[BTW: Thanks to Karl Fisch for spotchecking my hyperlink.]

That was my preface, but I didn’t explain myself. I asked them to tell me what was so significant about the photo.

“Because they’re hiding.”
“Because they’re on a train.”

I asked them what the relationship was between those two girls.

“Mother and daughter.”
“Sisters.”

I told them that the photo had rattled me so much because there is only one girl in that photo. Those two girls are the same person, separated by decades. The child grew into the adult who digitally inserted herself back into childhood portraits.

Whether the results constitute “musings on the contemporary relevance of the self-portrait” or, for me, a concise visual metaphor for everything that is so wonderful and horrifying about growing up, or something else entirely, I don’t know. But they’re wonderful.

[via]

The question I asked my students was, “when did you realize it was selling you Coke?” and “how many times did you see Coke throughout?”

The kids who are unfortunate sponges for product placement didn’t notice it was a Coke ad until the end. Savvier shoppers spotted the Coke billboard halfway through.

These classroom conversations are fun and useful and I’m glad we make room for them in math. I have given up posting my show and tell media here but if you’d like a feed of photos and video I show in my classes every day, I have tagged them here.

BTW: Jen notes that these photos were taken originally by a husband-and-wife team in Detroit who go by the name Sweet Juniper. They document Detroit’s decay wherever they find it, within the public school system and without. Nice find, Jen.

Video

• The opposite of sucking on helium.
• High speed skateboarding down Claremont Canyon in Berkeley, CA.
• A shockingly elegant skateboard reel, the first thirty seconds of which are required viewing for my graduate course in vodcasting. The silhouette photography makes the rest of it eminently watchable alsoSorry, but I have to make sure you understand how valuable it is that my RSS reader has pushed me a skateboarding reel which my students – some of which students will insist they have seen every skateboarding reel released to DVD or YouTube – have never seen. Or how much classroom management capital it buys me that I can point to a specific shot – sincerely – as my favorite, that I can ask them – sincerely – for their favorite. Wish my ed classes had included some coursework in “Pedagogically Profitable Ways To Kill Time.”.
• Mushrooms and mold growing very quickly.
• A UK schoolgirl breaks a Guinness World Record for balancing the most snails on her face at one time, remains unkissed for decades, inspires several of my students to take up snail hunting.

Photo

• We’ve been on something of an Iceland kick lately.
• Plus Dubai, and the Burj, the tallest skyscraper in the world.
• Brittny Badger rips appliances apart and puts ’em under glass. Probably tore the wings off flies as a kid too. (I mean, maybe she did, maybe she didn’t. Is it so wrong to suggest she did? Just tossing it out there. Maybe the voting public picks it up. Maybe I clean up the next news cycle. Can’t hurt to try.)

If I taught science, I’d toss this photo on the wall during one particular unit and let ’em fight over the method. Any readers know how this thing happened? I’ll toss the answer into the comments if y’all founder too long.

[Hint: the answer does not involve a really really tiny lawnmower.]

BTW: a month into summer and I’m totally off my game. Lemme just say that these lawns sculptures involve photosynthesis in kind of a crucial way.

Video

1. Clustarack
   

   A paper wad sets off a Rube Goldberg machine which, according to the behind-the-scenes featurette, required 98 takes. Something I Didn’t Know Yesterday But Which Makes Perfect Sense Today: in a Rube Goldberg machine, you want to schedule your most reliable elements at the end of the sequence so that failure comes swiftly and inexpensively.

2. Creme That Egg!
   

   Another Rube Goldberg machine, half as expensive, twice as impressive. We’re almost to the point in my classes, here at the end of the year, where no one snipes, “Huh dude has no life huh” at the end of these videos. I have cajoled, encouraged, and begged them at various times throughout the year to recognize that this is practice. Rather than dumping his cognitive surplus into something passive, Joseph Herscher performed a feat which is – yeah – merely diverting, but which is practice, which will keep his intellectual/creative muscles limber and toned for the rest of his life. Most of my students know nothing of this. How many adults know anything of this?cf. Never once “in the real world” will you have to push 200 lbs. off your chest so why do (non-competitive) weightlifters bother?

Photo

1. Sightseeing In Liberty City
   

   Grand Theft Auto IV‘s Liberty City adapts itself strictly from New York City. A photographer has compared sights and landmarks between the original and the clone. The results are mostly astonishing.

2. Malaysian Sky Bridge
   

   I learned a new word today: gephyrophobiac. Which I am now, thank you, internets.

Photo

1. Refacing Government Tender
   

   Don’t deny you ever did this. Pictured here is “Emo Lincoln,” which is spot on.

2. Youngme/Nowme
   

   Look, I don’t consider myself an emotional dude. I only the learned the spelling of “emotion” a month ago and internal reconnaissance has yet to discover any beyond “road rage.” Yet I tell you truly that “Youngme/Nowme” obliterated me. I’d like to believe I appreciate Ze Frank’s Internet icebreakers more than the average Web 2.0 fanboy/girl but I probably kid myself.

Video

1. Nike Soccer
   

   Nike spot directed by Guy Ritchie, putting you first-person into the world of professional soccer . All sorts of name-brand soccer stars show up, though, as with emotions, I’m only reporting second-hand here.

2. Syncing Metronomes
   

   via Jason Kottke, who writes “If you only watch one metronome video in your life, make it this one.” Someone please explain how this happened. ¶ I pinned the video to this study for good measure.