[BTW: Pardon my dust. I swapped hosts from GoDaddy to Site5. Our long national nightmare is over.]

Riley Lark:

Probability only works on large scales, and then it really only approaches working. The kids all get the basic stuff, like coin flips having 50/50 odds, they all don’t get the more complicated stuff like standard deviation. They lack the tools for problems with continuous distribution, and as far as I can tell that leaves us with carnival games and card tricks. Which only work on average. By being my interested, lively self during class I managed to interest half of them for most of the time (what are the odds that you‚ interested in this question, Johnny?). But it was a hard unit for me.

And then he kills the probability lesson anyway. It’s like watching Danny Ocean explain all the reasons why the safe positively cannot be cracked before shrugging his shoulders and cracking the safe anyway. And, make no mistake, Riley is breaking into the Fort Knox of probability problems here with Monty Hall, a problem that causes cranial hemorrhaging even among professional mathematists.

I’m grateful I have just enough classroom expertise to appreciate what a thing of beauty it is when Riley draws fifty marks on the board behind him, a subtle classroom action that’s the equivalent in precision and style to Magic Johnson flicking a no-look bounce pass between three defenders for the assist.

[BTW: I added the video below and some comments to the comments.]

[BTW: They bumped me to Thursday, same time.]

I will be on CNN tomorrow (Tuesday, May 17) at 11h05 PST to weigh in on either Elena Kagan’s Supreme Court nomination or curriculum design in math education, I forget which. It goes without saying that I prefer venues where I can either rehearse my thoughts obsessively for weeks (presentations) or draft and re-draft them until I don’t hate them (writing). Interviews are a whole other thing.

If you’re stopping by after the interview, wondering why they let that guy on TV, you’re invited to check out my recent TEDx talk or some of my experiments in curriculum design.

If you came here by way of the TED website, welcome, hello, nice to meet you. You can find a lot of the loose strands I tied together for that talk under the category heading “What Can You Do With This?” If today is a particularly slow work day, feel free also to check out the listing of most read posts or a list I culled myself.

It’s difficult for me to overstate how tedious I find the commenters at Kitchen Table Math, and math warriors more generally. It’s like watching two sides argue whether it’s better to feed children fruits or vegetables. Both sides approach the new and unfamiliar interested foremost in determining to which reductive party it belongs so they can get properly exercised.  This requires a healthy amount of unhealthy inference and I’m not inclined to engage any of it. (ie. “All we need are grocery line problems, apparently.” Have mercy.) 

Skill practice and conceptual development are both essential. I have no interest in any war between them, nor in anyone who suggests they’re enemies. I will put this judgment on the record, though: I have only ever found one of them difficult. Even in my first year, at my worst, I could dip into any number of instructional strategies and problem sets to teach students how to reliably factor, solve, simplify, and evaluate. I have always found it difficult, however, to give my students tools to resolve problems that they haven’t yet seen, to empower their intuition through math, or to convince them to give a damn.

I know I could turn to any one of the KTM pedants at any time to help me improve my skill practice instruction.  (Okay, maybe not after calling them “pedants.”) There are far fewer people who have any help to offer me on the harder challenge of math education. 

Sorry. It isn’t my quote but, seriously, can anyone do better than that for the mandate of the 21^st-century social studies teacher? Put it on a mug.

Highly recommended: Emily Nussbaum’s profile of David Simon, creator of fine teevee products like The Wire, Generation Kill, and now Treme, his show about New Orlean’s jazz musicians three months after Hurricane Katrina which debuted on Sunday:

“F–k the exposition,” he says gleefully as we go back into the bar. “Just be. The exposition can come later.” He describes a theory of television narrative. “If I can make you curious enough, there’s this thing called Google. If you’re curious about the New Orleans Indians, or ‘second-line’ musicians–you can look it up.” The Internet, he suggests, can provide its own creative freedom, releasing teachers writers from having to overexplain, allowing history to light the characters from within.

Treme‘s pilot, true to Simon’s challenging aesthetic, dumps the viewer into an unfamiliar-but-compelling environment full of unfamiliar-but-compelling people and trusts that, because the whole thing is so damn compelling, you’ll be back the next week to learn more.

Simon outsources the teacher’s usual role as classroom expositor to the Internet while claiming for himself the role as classroom storyteller, turning the unknown into something challenging, enticing, and compelling.

Tell me that division of labor isn’t ideal. Tell me you couldn’t dedicate a career to that mission statement. Tell me you couldn’t do it for social studies or science or even math.

BTW. Also highly recommended: a memo (allegedly) from David Mamet (another first-rate storyteller) to his writing staff.