We had our last-ever New Tech Network training this week. The project-based learning model which arrived with great fanfare concurrent with our district’s consolidation from four high schools to two will continue in practice, but our contract with NTN is up and is a luxury in our district’s current financial state.
We spent part of the day with our school coach doing learning walks through our classrooms, looking for evidence for the Thinking indicator on our evaluation rubric. One of the descriptors is that students apply what they have learned to “real-world” situations.
Back in the 2010’s those would have been fightin’ words amongst my online math connects. Like, what even is “real-world”? Especially if the problems don’t match up with our kids’ actual, real-life, real world.
While state standards, evaluation tools, and every textbook ever call for applications of the math, in reality that means students often wrestle with problems that have been rendered unrecognizable by the contortions required to bend them into a word problem.
Our Wednesday Early-Release PD was a session from the New Tech Annual Conference last summer on Problem-based learning, what the NTN people call PrBL. (If you know three-act math, you have a good mental image). Long story short, we created a math fight over the proper way to evaluate exponential expressions, including negative exponents.
The assembled math, science, and special ed teachers were good sports despite well, (gestures broadly) everything. They played the role of freshmen algebra students to a T. It took a nudge to get them to describe their thinking, not just to speak out loud the math they’d put down on poster paper. But they got the spirit right. Student-centered learning, with a competitive twist.
My co-presenter did an outstanding job of pointing out that this wasn’t a “real-world” problem as traditionally understood but it hooked them in in a way no worksheet or MathXL assignment can.
Algebra II taxes a teacher’s ability to make “real-world” connections like maybe no other high school math course. I once described the second semester of Algebra II as “weird” to an administrator, which didn’t win me any points with him but I think at least accurately described a super-theoretical, super-abstract semester of math that relies in large part on a group of kids with terminal junioritis recalling and using their algebraic manipulation skills from long ago.
So we do a lot of projects second semester. This year (in a nod to NTN’s project-based model) I led off the probability and statistics unit with a March Madness investigation and Bracket Challenge. That hooked them in and has served as an anchor as we work our way through the unit. Plus it gives me something other than gambling as a real-world application.
Today, once we had finished notes and guided practice on probability of multiple events, I switched gears again. I had hinted that TV game shows all revolve around math, and several kids copped to watching The Price Is Right at grandma’s house as kids.
So I shared a piece of video with them.
We paused often as we went along. “How many of those baseballs have digits on them? How many strikes? OK, what’s the probability she draws a ball with a digit on it? Five out of eight? Awesome.”
I let Drew Carey fill in the contestant on the rules, and then a quick aside: “OK, so there’s five digits in the price of the car. How many ways can she put 5 digits in order? Five factorial, yeah. So somebody do the math. What is that? 120 ways? Wow.”
Every time she pulled a baseball out of the bag we re-calculated the probabilties of a digit and a strike.
“OK, so if she gets a number and puts it in the right position, then how many ways are there to arrange the other four digits? Just 24? Let’s go.”
We agonized as she struggled to put the digits in order to nail down the price of an Alfa Romeo. (A what now? When we were kids that would have been a pretty nice Chevy, but welcome to 2024). Everybody had a pretty good sense the first digit wasn’t a two but after that? Anybody’s guess. Including the contestant, who wasn’t able to place a single digit before striking out. “This game is impossible! How does anybody ever win?”
It was five quick minutes, but five good minutes. Some rapid-fire, non-Google-able practice on a couple of the topics we’d covered this week.
And it made the math real. Which is all I want with 38 school days left and spring fever here and teacher cuts and school closures looming. When teaching’s all I got left, I’m gonna use every tool I got.
Tweaking For No Reason 