Surprise occurs when the world reveals itself as more orderly or disorderly than we expected. When we’re surprised, we relax assumptions about the world we previously held tightly. When we’re surprised, we’re interested in resolving the difference between our expectations and reality.

In short, when we’re surprised we’re ready to learn.

We can design for surprise too, increasing the likelihood students experience that readiness for learning. But the Intermediate Value Theorem does not, at first glance, look like a likely site for mathematical surprise. I mean read it:

If a continuous function, f, with an interval, [a, b], as its domain, takes values f(a) and f(b) at each end of the interval, then it also takes any value between f(a) and f(b) at some point within the interval.

[I slam several nails through the door and the floor so you’re stuck here with me for a second.]

Nitsa Movshovits-Hadar argues in a fantastic essay that “every mathematics theorem is surprising.” She continues, “If the claim stated in the theorem were trivial it would be of no interest to establish it.”

What surprised Cauchy so much that he figured he should take a minute to write the Intermediate Value Theorem down? How can we excavate that moment of surprise from the antiseptic language of the theorem? Check out our activity and watch how it takes that formal mathematical language and converts it to a moment of surprise.

We ask students, which of these circles must cross the horizontal axis? Which of them might cross the horizontal axis? Which of them must not cross the horizontal axis?

They formulate and defend their conjectures and then we invite them to inspect the graph.

In the next round, we throw them their first surprise: functions are fickle. Do not trust them.

And then finally we throw them the surprise that led Cauchy to establish the theorem:

But you can’t expect me to spoil it. Check it out, and then let us know in the comments how you’ve integrated surprise into your own classrooms.

Related: Recipes for Surprising Mathematics

2020 Feb 19. via Ben Blum-Smith.

Sometimes you check just a few examples and decide something is always true. But sometimes even 9.8 × 10⁴² examples is not enough!!!@gregeganSF and I came up with this shocker here on Twitter. To see what's really going on, visit my blog:https://t.co/Yw0S0Iyyx9 pic.twitter.com/1FThY9skeZ

— John Carlos Baez (@johncarlosbaez) September 21, 2018

I don’t know her name. I’ll call her Jan. Jan is about to testify to the power of surprise.

I asked the crowd to give me three numbers between 1 and 6, numbers you might get from a roll of the dice. They said 2, 3, and 5. Then I asked all of them to evaluate those numbers in this expression.

Most of the crowd started working on that task, but Jan didn’t. She laughed and said, “I teach second grade,” excusing herself.

I encouraged her to show off whatever she remembered from the last time she worked with expressions like this. She scribbled on the notebook in her lap and we managed to evaluate x = 2 in the time we had, but not 3 or 5.

I asked the crowd to call out the result for 2, 3, and 5. They called out 2, 6, and 20, one after the other.

Then I asked the crowd to evaluate those same three numbers in this expression.

Jan tossed her notepad on the desk, a reaction of “no way, no thank you” to the length of that expression. I decided not to press her at that exact moment, because I had a secret everyone in the crowd would come to understand at different times, Jan last of all and perhaps best of all.

I asked for their result for 2.

“0.”

“Okay, what about 3?”

“0.”

“Okay, that’s weird. What about 5?”

“0.”

I played up my surprise, acting like I didn’t know all of those terms would simplify to 0.

That’s when I noticed Jan. Out of the corner of my eye, Jan straighted up in her chair and then picked up her notebook to sort out what just happened.

I wish I had a sharper vocabulary to describe this transformation, as well as more strategies for provoking it. By showing Jan a situation where order arose from apparent disorder, she felt something in the neighborhood of … cognitive conflict? Intellectual need? “Surprise” feels closest.

I don’t know all the words and I don’t know all the strategies, but I know there are few gifts a teacher can give a student more satisfying than helping her transform from “no way, no thank you” to “okay, let’s sort this out.”

Discuss:

• I don’t think this experience has much to do with Jan’s growth mindset about herself, or mine about her, but I’m willing to be proven wrong. How was this experience distinct (or similar) to a mindset experience?
• Think about the design of this activity, all of its different permutations, and how each one might have affected Jan. What if, for instance, I had given given the class those three numbers instead of soliciting them from the class? What if I had only solicited one number? What if all three numbers didn’t evaluate to the same number? How would these permutations have affected Jan’s interest in picking up her notebook?