"Game Theory in Math Class"

My first professional publication has been released! Check out "Game Theory in Math Class" in the Fall issue of Independent Teacher here.

On my way to NCTM Houston!

I'm very excited to be traveling to NCTM Houston today through Friday. If you're at the conference, come see my presentation! I'll be delivering a talk titled "Using Game Theory to Foster Discourse in Middle Grades Classrooms" in Room 351BE at 11:30 on Thursday.

When Honors Students Complain about Ed Tech...

This is my third school year using an iPad/AppleTV combination to project math problems on the board. It's ended up being one of my main forms of direct instruction.

The projector displays whatever is on my iPad screen. The image it creates only takes up about a third of my white board, but it's clearly visible from anywhere in my classroom. I use a free app called "Educreations" to write problems on the iPad with a stylus, and whatever I write is displayed on the board.

I love it, because I never have to turn my back on the class to write math problems on the board (the classic bane of a math teacher's classroom management attempts). I also get to move around the classroom freely and never be too far away from one section of students for long. Since I've eliminated a lot of the temptation to misbehave by never turning my back on anyone and being close by, I've had way fewer behavior issues.

The students typically love it, because they can actually hear me when I talk about the problem as I write it, and visibility is far superior. Heretofore, it's been a win-win scenario, with me writing fewer referrals and the students learning more math.

This week, though, I had complaints for the very first time... and they came from, of all people, my 8th grade Honors Geometry Students!

These kids are a full 2 years ahead in math... they're even a year ahead of many of our other honors students, who are taking Honors Algebra 1 in the 8th grade. In other words, these are my people, the math nerds. With one voice, they spoke in my C Block this past week: they hate the Educreations/iPad/AppleTV form of lecture I've been doing. I mean, they passionately hate it, and with one voice begged me to stop it. 

I've never been one to ignore the cries of my people, so I went back to traditional whiteboard lectures with that class. But I've been pondering the uprising all week...

• Their stated reason: they told me it's because Educreations only shows a limited amount of material, and with longer problems they want to see the whole problem all at once (rather than have me scrolling up and down to display different parts of a problem). 

This makes a certain amount of sense to me: I think they tend to be "big picture" thinkers, and they want see every part of that big picture all at once. Other students might see one problem taking up an entire white board (as some of our Geometry problems do) and be overwhelmed, but for them it's helpful. 

• What I think might be another, unspoken factor: these kids are heavily invested in THE-WAY-THINGS-HAVE-ALWAYS-BEEN. The traditional classroom model has worked out extraordinarily well for them, and they are heavily invested in its continued preservation. All their lives, a math teacher has stood at the front of the class and written on a white board, and all their lives they've taken that experience and turned it into straight A's and accolades. There's a lot of comfort for them in THE-WAY-THINGS-HAVE-ALWAYS-BEEN, and the pedagogical advantages of Mr. McLaughlin's technology be damned. 

Has anyone else experienced this kind of resistance to technology (or other changes) in honors students? I'd love to hear your thoughts!

Proving with Padlet: Can 18 Students Really Collaborate on One Problem at the Same Time?

Our technology integration coordinator, Meghan, sent out an email a couple of weeks ago about a site called Padlet. The idea of the site pretty simple: you make a padlet--really just a blank slate with a title-- and anybody can post something to it. 

The posts look something like post-it notes stuck to a wall. You can write directly onto these "post-it notes", or upload a file to them, such as a word doc or a jpg. The site is incredibly easy to use, and doesn't require posters to make an account or register. 

So I thought I would try it out with my 8th grade Geometry students... 

I broke the class into 6 groups of 3. I gave them a couple of postulates to work with, and told them that I'd like them to try and prove a list of theorems using those postulates as starting points. When a group thought they had a good proof for a theorem, they could post it to a padlet I created. After a group or two had posted, I told the rest of the groups that they could certainly look at other groups' proofs, BUT they had to read them critically: they were to look for missing steps, ways to improve the proof, etc. Once every group had posted a proof for a particular theorem, we would look at them all and see if we could come to a class consensus on the best way (or ways) to prove a particular theorem. 

Because Padlet is so easy to use and doesn't require an account, some groups started posting within just a few minutes. As they did, other groups found inspiration and started posting improvements and alterations a few minutes later. 

Here are the initial posts from the first theorem I asked them to prove: given that two lines are parallel, can you show that the alternate interior angles created by a transversal are congruent (the postulate they were given was that corresponding angles are congruent)? 

The students used OneNote to be able to write onto their touch screens with a stylus, and then took screen shots of their work and uploaded them as jpgs. The quality of the initial work really varies, but everyone had something to contribute. After we projected all of these onto the board and critiqued them as a class, the students were able to quickly come to a consensus about what they thought would be the "perfect" proof of the theorem. 

Meghan, our technology integration coordinator, shared an analogy with us about classroom tech: there's a "shallow end of the pool" and a "deep end of the pool". The "shallow end" represents using tech to do things you've already done, but in a more efficient way: maybe you give the kids a test online rather than on paper, or you've posted your homework assignment on a website rather than passing out hard copies of an assignment sheet. The "deep end" is when you are using tech to do something completely new--that is, tech has added actual pedagogical value, rather than just making your life more convenient or saving paper. 

I think the Padlet exercise may have gotten my class into the "deep end"... I've always been a fan of group work and collaboration in math class. But I've NEVER before had an entire class be able to work together on a problem in a meaningful way...in the past, collaboration ceased to be meaningful after the group got larger than 3 or 4. 

Now, though, this particular bit of tech made it possible for all 18 students in my C block to collaborate and contribute to a problem in a meaningful way...Everyone was engaged, and everyone's ideas made it into the conversation because Padlet allowed them to see what other groups were thinking in real time. 

So I'm filing this exercise under "use again in the near future"...

Can Learning to Knit Help Learning to Code?

There's a really fascinating article up on Mind Shift that compares the instructions that knitters follow with computer programming. You can find it here. 

From the article:

When electrical engineering professor Dr. Karen Shoop of Queen Mary University in London took her first knitting workshop, she noticed immediately that knitting is very similar to writing computer code. “I noticed that knitting instructions are largely binary (like computers) – in other words, knit or purl,” she said. “More interesting were the knitting instructions, which read just likeregular expressions [of code], used for string matching and manipulation when coding.” Shoop also recognizes that the earliest stages of computing were inspired by handwork: “Of course, computers ultimately started off partially inspired by weaving and the Jacquard loom, or earlier Bouchon’s loom. Arguably some of the earliest programmers were the people making the card/paper punch hole patterns for weaving patterns.”...

“Students often feel anything to do with computing (especially coding) is in a separate bubble,” she said. “And I wanted to show that we ‘code’ in our outside world.” Shoop even had a student — an enthusiastic knitter — who, as a senior class project, developed a digital tool that could recognize and generate new knitting patterns.  “We’re interested in how creativity can inform technology and help create and inform new tools and technologies to support the creative process,” she said.

One of the conversations I've been having a lot lately is about incorporating more coding into math class. I'd hate for coding to become just another skill to add to the list of things kids ought to be able to do... this article seems to me to suggest a way to show kids that coding is a way of thinking about problems in a different light. And as a math teacher, I am all about seeing problems in a different light...

 

My First Musing

Welcome to my new blog!

My name is Ryan, and I am a middle division math instructor at Berkeley Preparatory School in Tampa, FL. I'm currently teaching Honors Pre-Algebra, Algebra 1, and Honors Geometry. In the past, I've had the privilege to teach every grade from 6-12, and to have been a department chair and a resource teacher.

When I was teaching at a school in a heavily Irish-American community outside of Boston, there were two teachers named "Mr. McLaughlin": myself and an English teacher. And of course, we both taught 7th grade. To distinguish between us, some of the students started to call me "Mr. MATH-Laughlin," and it stuck. "MathLaughlin" has been my nickname ever since.

This blog will be where I share my thoughts on all things education, math, and related topics. Thanks for visiting!