The Average Person Spends 24 Years of Their Life Asleep

No objections to the grammatical error in the title, please! It's a quotation from "The Joy of Stats", a 1-hour BBC Four program narrated by the Swedish public health expert and statistician Hans Rosling. I had first heard of him when a friend sent me a link to the short video, "200 Countries, 200 Years, 4 Minutes", which turns out to be an excerpt from "The Joy of Stats". If you want to take four minutes of your life to feel much much better about the future of the planet, stop and watch that video now.

While watching this video, it struck me that it would be a great way to address one of my New Year's resolutions for teaching: TEACH MORE STATISTICS.

I teach math to students who don't love math and maybe never will despite my best efforts. Some of them may go on to take calculus in high school or college, or they may study engineering, economics, medicine or some other field that demands high mathematical abilities. But my guess is that some of them will be artists, some will be business owners, some lawyers, some journalists (if that's still a profession in their time), etc. Those professions just don't require a high degree of specialized algebra or calculus knowledge. Yes, it's great for them to develop problem-solving abilities through algebra, geometry and calculus. But honestly, what they need to is to learn stats. That's where we see math everyday.

Here's a challenge for you. Pick up a newspaper and find a random article. Now try to read to the second column of the article without reading a statistic. Good luck. Stats matter. We are constantly confronted with them so that we will be persuaded to believe the arguments and stories put before us. Stats have all the credibility. Especially in today's world of overwhelming amounts of data.

So, my goal is to teach more statistics and maybe even to have students connect statistics (and hence math!) to the things they already care about. Baseball. Basketball. Blockbuster movies. Cell phones. Shopping. Whatever.

Here's where I need some help. What should students learn to do with statistics? We teach them about mean, median, mode, etc. But what about teaching them how to collect data? And deal with organizing messy data from multiple sources that come in at different times?

Do you use statistics in your life? What do you do?

Shameless Attempt to Be a Featured Workspace on Lifehacker

I work with students on editing their writing at my desk, but it's often awkward to share the keyboard and mouse. All I want to do is show where the student needs to insert a comma or fix a typo, but it can be disruptive when we they don't understand exactly where I mean.

Also, with some students it is very difficult for them to get their ideas out when they have to write them, although they can give you perfectly clear answers verbally. So sometimes I will type the work for them while they dictate, but then the keyboard is out of their hands and they can't transition into writing for themselves.

I solved this problem by adding an Apple Wiresless Keyboard and Magic Mouse to double up. The installation was easy since both devices work on Bluetooth. The wireless keyboard is much smaller, which is nice since many of my students are so used to their laptop keyboards that they have trouble using the larger standard keyboard. The Magic Mouse has so many extra features like zooming and web browsing that its an upgrade. All of it is so small that it doesn't have to clutter my desk and I can put it all away if I ever really need the desk space.

Today we installed the same devices on the other desks in our office and the response has been good. I just finished watching a teacher and student have a typing race. It will be interesting to see how helpful this is once everyone gets used to the new devices.

WCYDWT: Fare HIke

Reading the NY Times today I saw a blog post regarding the MTA's vote to raise the price for 30-day and weekly metro passes as well as individual fares. What caught my eye was that the article described one increase (for the 30-day passes) in terms of percent increase. That was all I needed.

Following the Meyer method, I got an image of the article and blacked out the percent increase answer for the students. I asked them to predict what the percent increase could be. We investigated the problem. I demonstrated how to find percent increase, which only a few of the students seemed to have learned before. Then, we checked our answer against a clean copy of the article that I printed later.

Overall, there was some learning and some excitement, but I can't help thinking that I could have done this better. What could I have done differently?

Before:

After:

Notes for next time:

• Next time black out the answer in Keynote, then print. My students spent a ridiculous amount of time trying to read through the dark splotch that I made with my pen before making copies.
• We tied in our steps for problem solving (Understand, Plan, Answer, Check) a bit too late. It would have really helped to direct their frustrations if we were introducing the structure earlier.
• The guessing/estimating gets a little distracting because the students attempt to revise their guess at each stage in our problem-solving process. It needs to be stated more clearly that while we can keep revising the end is to have a solution, not a guess.

The Odyssey, Oral Storytelling and the iPad

Today I had problem: I have students who are going to spend the next month reading The Odyssey, a book which I failed to fully appreciate when I was a college student reading it for the first time. I wondered how the high school students are going to be able to a) read the book without relying on Sparknotes, Cliffnotes, or other summaries of the text and b) get more out of this than if they were to just read it to themselves and not comprehend a good fraction of the narrative.

Here's my solution: technology.

How I got there:
Fortunately, I have MP3 files of the audiobook of The Odyssey that I bought for my dad years ago. I had planned to read along with the story using the audiofiles in order to experience the story as its original audience did, by hearing it from an oral storyteller. I had originally thought about posting the files somewhere online where the students would be able to access them, but the Fair Use Policy doesn't feel like enough license to do that. Then, I thought about putting the files on CD for students to burn to their own hard drives, iPods, etc. Finally, I remembered how my school is lending me this iPad and how I haven't been sharing it enough with the office (how surprising!). So here's the new plan:

1. Burn the audiofiles for all of The Odyssey onto the iPad.
2. Download the same edition for iBooks.
3. Lend out the iPad to teachers and students in the office when I am not around.

They can use it to curl up and read and listen to the text read aloud as they follow along. Presumably, hearing it performed will add more meaning than their straight internal narration with all of its stumbling for pronunciations of ancient Greek words and names. Then, we'll see if this is a better reading experience for any of them than the more traditional alternative.

I think it's crazy that it takes a very modern piece of hardware to inspire a teacher ask students to listen to an epic poem.

Addendum:
The NY Times had an article on how children may read more with access to e-readers.
I liked these stats:

About 25 percent of the children surveyed said they had already read a book on a digital device, including computers and e-readers. Fifty-seven percent between ages 9 and 17 said they were interested in doing so.

And:

Many children want to read books on digital devices and would read for fun more frequently if they could obtain e-books. But even if they had that access, two-thirds of them would not want to give up their traditional print books.

WCYDWT Challenge: Tie Clip

I spotted this very stylish tie clip on one of our school's staff members. Apparently he wears it nearly everyday, but I just noticed it.

I'm wondering what can you do with this? What would you ask students to discover? What would you ask them to explain?

Addendum: When I first saw this number pattern on the tie clip, I thought this could make for a nice easy introduction to looking for mathematics in everyday life. This number pattern itself is so simple "3, 6, 9, 12", but the presentation in Roman numerals makes it a little more enriching. We have some number theory lessons coming up and talking about Roman versus Arabic numerals could be a nice conversation starter. Plus, I like this really simple pattern to introduce students to the WCYDWT framework.

What most excites me about this whole idea though is how accessible it is to all the students in our Grades 1 to 12 building. The next step is to scale this larger and make it open to more people to contribute their own ideas and images. Why can't students take photos for themselves of interesting objects around the school? We have an upcoming pep rally and I'd love to see this be able to launch as a website before then so that we can roll this out as a competition among grades, something that builds up our school's culture.

So far, I've passed this image around just enough for a few staff members to find out whose tie and tie clip this is while a few more are still looking. Some of them were thrown off by looking for the tie itself and not the tie clip. Meanwhile, the owner has been wearing it something like 4 out of 5 days now. So far this has been a conversation starter for just a few of us who would probably talk anyway and maybe a few more still who just didn't have that much to talk about before. What can we all do next?

Mistakes Made Using the Socratic Method

While sitting in our school's office for 1-on-1 tutoring, I observed that a good tutor is a good at explaining, not necessarily questioning a la the familiar Socratic Method.

A lot of times when you see an adult trying to tutor a child you witness a dialogue that runs something like this:

Child: "It says to solve for x. It says 2x + 10 = 50

Parent: "So how do you solve for x?"

Child: "Uh,...."

Parent: "How do you do it, honey?"

Child: "Multiply?"

Parent: "No,.... What do you do first?"

Child: "Add."

This is frustrating for both parties, of course.

The problem here is that the Socratic Method is a great pedagogical technique, but mostly for teaching a class in seminar-type environment.

It is not a winning strategy for tutoring a single student in a 1-on-1 environment.

Here's why:

1. Unless a student is very bright, he probably don't know everything they are supposed to know. About anything. He may have some areas where he knows way more than you would think. But just try asking an average kid to remember metaphor vs. similar or order of operations. They are gonna slip up.
   
2. In a class, there are a lot of students that know nothing about a subject. But there are also bound to be some who know something. In the aggregate, a conversation can arise where most questions can be answered. Or an answer can be attempted. Which the teacher can guide. Maybe using the Socratic Method, and maybe not.
   

Let the tutors explain. The teachers can teach. And use the Socratic Method with caution, everybody.

It's 8:05 P.M., Your Homework is Late!

Following up on my previous post on how I want to stop grading, I thought it would be good to provide some notes from the field as we head in to our second full week.

• I sent out a "Math Checkup" using a Google Form. This was a pretty quick and easy diagnostic assessment that I made using NYS Testing Program multiple choice questions. A few students had trouble opening the form either in their e-mail or through a hyperlink, but after a few days most everyone had figured it out. I now know a rough estimate of each student's proficiency and could figure out the value-add at the end of the year if I give a similar exam. I also know a few topics to cover early on that I may have skipped over. Oh, and did I mention that I can skip collecting exams, grading the answers and entering the data into Excel?

• We have started to do nightly homework assignments also using Google Forms. When I gave out a quick survey at the end of this past week, I got the following results:

"The one thing that should change about this class is..."
"The homework" (1)

"The one thing that should NOT change about this class is..."
"The homework" (2)

Ever seen kids answer a survey and say that they didn't want the homework to change? And that one student is getting a paper copy printout tomorrow.

• While the students are completing their homework in Google Forms, I come home from school everyday and check my Google account after dinner. I always get to see who has completed the assignment already and can think ahead to what we need to review in class the next day.

The next steps for this project:

1. Reliability - This is an issue. Some kids have been reporting trouble opening the email or submitting their finished work. I think a few more test cases should help solve this.
2. Confirmation - Everyday students have come in to class asking "Did you get my homework?" It's music to my ears! However, I'd like for them to know that I received their work before then so there is no anxiety. Currently, I've customized the confirmation note, but even this leaves them wondering if it even worked.
3. Feedback - One possible solution to #2 is to give the students permission to view the results. This would be great because it could give them instantaneous feedback on whether they got it right or not. However, currently this would mean they could see everyone's answers. I need to make sure they can be trusted not to use that information for evil. I want to trust them, but we need to discuss this and maybe build up our group norms a bit. There is also the risk that they could cheat by seeing the answers then sending them to a friend. But that's why I love that time stamp feature that is built in. I wouldn't mind students submitting, checking and resubmitting. In fact, that would be the best. Video games good.