Let’s celebrate excellence in dead-tree-based math curricula when we see it:

While many texts use those numbered steps to reduce their tasks to something mealy and mushy, this particular text offers useful general advice for solving problems with mathematics. You can almost feel the teacher’s exasperation as the student haggles for hints:

S: I don’t know where to start.
T: Okay, have you made a diagram?
S: Okay now what.
T: Can you tell me about the diagram in words?
S: Okay now what.
T: Have you turned words into labels?
S: Okay –
T: – labels into equations? Have you solved the equation?

That’s decomposition that’ll help the student with problems beyond this one.

Meanwhile, this problem basically cops to the fact that even after it’s decomposed itself into a million mushy little bits, there’s no way anyone has bothered to wade through them all so it says, “C’mon, you guys. Just throw these functions into your graphing calculator and figure out where they cross so we can all get out of here.”

Total knowledge required of projectile motion, speed of sound, the resistance of air, or anything more demanding than how to manipulate Wolfram Alpha?

Zero.

I’m a subcontractor of a subcontractor of Pearson Foundation on this project.

I’d been waiting to mention it until after we finished negotiating our long-term contract but I’ve been on a short-term contract long enough to feel icky writing about the publishing industry without disclosing that it keeps the lights on at Meyer Manor.

I don’t check the imprint before I criticize a textbook. Pearson basically owns all of them anyway and since they’re all printed on paper, they all share some of the same fundamental flaws. In any case, no one I work with has ever sent me a note asking me to back off. They hired me because of my opinions on curriculum design, not in spite of them.

More:

Those are the basics, the essential disclosure. If you feel invested in my story, though, here are some more personal details including a) how the offer came up, b) why I picked this project, and c) what it all means for the curricula I post here:

How the offer came up

I don’t like to think or talk about how drastically a single 11-minute talk altered my professional landscape. I remember talking to The Jose Vilson afterwards. He was really kind about the talk and I was like, “Yeah, but this isn’t anything I haven’t written about a million times, right?” I’m still befuddled by the reception, so I’ve been treating every workshop I’ve been asked to facilitate, every talk I’ve been asked to give, and every person who’s asked to meet up with me, as if it’s the last one ever. TEDxNYED put a gust of wind in my professional sails and for that I probably owe David Bill a Christmas ham for the rest of his life, but I am trying hard not to squander that momentum and stagnate.

Having called out the publishing industry in front of what is now, in the YouTube era, a very large stadium, I was equally befuddled by the reception from editors. I took calls and meetings with the three majors and several smaller imprints. They all expressed awareness of a problem. In many cases, the problem they were aware of was “the industry is bleeding and digital is coming after us like a shark.” Meanwhile, the problem that interests me is “print media makes math applications boring and hard for students.” Still, it seemed like we could help each other out.

A reader asked in an e-mail about the irony of going to work for an industry I criticize. I replied that I didn’t see the irony. “They’re hiring me to fix things I don’t like about their product,” I said.

Why I picked this project

There were several interesting offers but time is short and I’m still enrolled in a very challenging doctoral program so I took on the Pearson project for several reasons:

1. The people involved are top shelf. Phil Daro chaired the math side of the Common Core State Standards and he’s the project lead. The international design group includes a bunch of people whose baseball cards I’ve been collecting since I was a new teacher. Basically, this project puts me in a position to learn a whole lot from a whole lot of very interesting people. That, plus the advice I receive from Jo Boaler and Pam Grossman at Stanford, has me sitting on an embarrassment of intellectual riches.
2. They get my vision, they appreciate it, and they offer great criticism. I’ve submitted maybe a dozen tasks already. They’ve accepted some. They’ve waved off others. We’ve debated some. Those discussions have always been productive. They’ve also welcomed my thoughts on what the platform itself should look like.
3. I don’t have to make problems I don’t care about. I don’t have to draft pages on pages of factoring exercises. They want me to make tasks I want to make.
4. The scale of the project is huge. A lot of people I admire have a lot of concerns about the scale of this project. Me? I want as many students as possible working on tasks I find worthwhile.
5. The headquarters are thirty minutes away. The subcontractor’s, not Pearson’s. Some of the other projects would have had me traveling around the country and there are a lot of reasons why I need to do less of that right now.

Those are the biggest reasons.

What it all means for the curricula I post here

Currently I license all my writing and curricula CC-BY which means anyone can do anything with it (including sell it) so long as my name is attached. The terms of the licensing of my work to Pearson are still under negotiation but I don’t want to do work I can’t write about or share freely here. So I’m offering Pearson an exclusive commercial license for my tasks. I’ll still make those tasks freely available to you but they’ll be licensed CC-BY-NC, which means no one but Pearson can use them commercially. I hired an attorney to protect those particular interests.

The biggest difference, I suspect, will be more math problems and better math problems. I’ve had to upgrade the Flip camera and the point-and-shoot and I have to make a lot more tasks now. Fingers crossed. Hopefully we’re all walking away winners here.

2011 Aug 08: Edited “Pearson” to “Pearson Foundation”

1. My Perplexity Session is sold out. If you’d like to get on the waiting list for cancellations, I’ll take those on a first-come-first-served basis either in the comments here or by e-mail at the session website itself.
2. I’ll be giving a free keynote + Q & A in Atlanta, GA, on Wednesday, August 3, at 7:00PM. Here’s the one-sheet. My hosts will be filming the talk and I’ll add that link to this post whenever they make it available.

I gave the opening talk at NCTM’s High School Institute yesterday in Orlando, FL. At the end, a man introduced himself as a teacher and former textbook editor and set me straight on a couple of things:

1. Publishers decompose rich mathematical tasks into mealy, mushy little bits because teachers want them to. Teachers review those books and point to problems and say, “That’s too hard. That one too. My students can’t do that one. Break that down for me.”
2. Same with the overly helpful pointers to previously worked examples. “You want me to assign this for homework? Only if you make a note in the margin pointing to the example problem it’s exactly like.”
3. Same with the cornball visuals. “Too much text. Can you throw in some color?”

Publishers respond to market pressure from teachers who are responding to a similar kind of market pressure from students. I have arrived at very different responses to the same pressure. (ie. Does anyone really think students are engaged by the cartoony nonsense they find in the margins of their books?) Making myself the best advocate I can be for those responses is, of course, the challenge.

BTW: Lisa Henry posted a detailed review of my keynote. I want to highlight her remark about the #anyqs project:

I am finding more and more math around me. It pokes in my head when I least expect it.

I heard this in Grand Forks, also. The #anyqs exercise seems to be genuinely transformative for at least some teachers. Whether that transformation results in any kind of significant change in student achievement or in the disposition of their classes is an open question.

Tom Woodward:

Seriously. You can’t afford to be this naive any longer. That “award” certifying you as a really super X-brand teacher, that free conference registration- these are not things they do for you out of kindness1. This is for them. Every single bit of it, bought and paid for. Their return on investment is pre-calculated. If it didn’t make them money, they would not do it.

Posted from Phoenix in a hotel ballroom with other Apple Distinguished Educators while listening to Apple Retail Market Leader Christina Sanchez (Arizona / New Mexico) sell us on selling our students on a career selling Apple products.