Teaching Math Using YouTube

I took my first video class at my former day camp in the summer between fourth and fifth grades. It was a two person class, and we made a documentary about the camp using a shoulder mounted camera that recorded directly to a VHS tape. By the time I was teaching video at the same camp fifteen years later, we were using handheld MiniDV cameras, and editing the movies using FinalCut and Adobe Premier.

I have taken the video skills I learned there, and brought them into my Spanish classes as well, filming everything from short skits to elaborate movies written and directed by the students themselves. I have found the video camera to be an excellent motivating force in the classroom. Knowing that they will be on film makes the students work harder and rehearse more, while at the same time having more fun with the project. Everybody wins.

I have been out of the classroom for most of the last three years, so I have yet to take the next step in the evolution of using video in the classroom, posting on YouTube for all the world to see. Based on a brief tour of YouTube yesterday, a lot of classrooms are taking advantage of the opportunity, and are posting some very creative and funny things. I thought I would include a couple of my favorites, all covering topics in math, since that is still the section of my curriculum table that I am supposed to be writing about these days.

The first video was brought to my attention by Joanne Jacobs, and started me on my YouTube exploration:



Not quite as professional, but more in keeping with what a high school class might put together is this Fergie spoof:



Then, there's nothing like two white kids having a rap battle about math. I feel like I know these two.



Finally, this may be my favorite. I think this kid has a future in educational song writing. It's not so much the song as that he has the audience in the palm of his hand.



The videos go on and on, and are of wide ranging quality. Mostly I just enjoy them because it is always nice to see students having fun in school while still doing something educational. It makes the teaching part more fun, too.

Just One More Reason Why Teaching Is Hard

Just a quick post this morning before running out to our school's Field Day to watch little kids run relay races and pour water on each other and generally enjoy a beautiful sunny day here in northern Virginia.

This article from the New York Times is a few weeks old now, but it fits in with the math theme of the last few posts. The article is about a study from Ohio State University that seems to contradict many people's instincts about how to teach math. Most people, myself included, would think that in order to explain math to the widest variety of students, it is best to apply it to real world situations. The NYT article gives the example of the classic two trains leave a station word problem.

The Ohio State study found, on the other hand, that the opposite may be true; that we learn mathmatical concepts better, and can apply them better, when we learn them as exactly that, concepts. In the case of the train problem, students should learn the algebraic formula first, then learn how to apply it to specific real world situations.

If this finding holds up, it would require a major change in perspective from math teachers at all levels. The problem is, this study suffers from the kinds of problems that so many education related studies suffer from, and is a good example of why it is so hard to come up with a scientifically based approach to teaching.

First of all, the subjects of the study, as with most pychological studies, were college students. Applying what works for teaching 18-22 year olds to teaching eight or nine year olds is a big stretch.

Second, the activities invented for the study, in order to find a mathematical concept that would be new to college students, strike me as a little bit artificial. It's not like the experiment was done with quadratic equations, or something else more relevant to teaching school-age children.

To me, this is why teaching is still a mix of an art and a science. There is information out there, but the information is far from perfect. The skilled teacher is able to sift through it, figure out what will work, and put together appropriate lessons for the specific students he has in front of him at the moment. It is always about knowing the kids you have in your class.

Happy One Month Anniversary Build a School

As part of this blog project, I have been reading a number of "How to Write a Successful Blog" blogs. One of the things that comes up over and over is that you should share milestones and successes with your readers. With that in mind, I thought I would take this opportunity to reflect on my first complete month of writing this blog, and share some of the things I have been learning.

It seems appropriate that this would come in the middle of a series of posts on math, because one of the things I have been having the most fun with on this blog has been tracking the numbers. The part of me that has always enjoyed getting up in the morning and checking the Red Sox' box score, now also has Feedburner and Google Analytics to play with. Here are some of my stats so far.

26 posts
Almost one a day, not too shabby.

8 comments
Top commenter honors go to Eric with two so far. What I've learned about comments is that the best way to get someone to leave a comment is to mention them in the post. It works like a charm. I'm hoping as the blog grows that this number will really take off. I'd love for this blog to become more and more of a conversation.

77 unique visitors from 60 cities in 8 countries on 4 continents
This is the greatest thing about the Internet. Instead of having these conversations in my office with four other language teachers, it is going on all over the world. Just three continents to go.

3-5 subscribers (varies from day to day)
One is me, one is my wife, and it's a safe bet that a third is my mom, so thanks the the other two of you, whoever you are.

The most fun part of Google Analytics is all of the graphs. There's just something about numbers displayed visually that makes me happy. Yes, I'm a nerd.



Here's the graph of visitors per day. The spike at the beginning is when I sent out my first big email announcing the blog to everyone I know. Since then I've been averaging about five visitors a day. In the scheme of things, it's still a baby blog, but I'm proud.


Here's the pie chart of traffic sources. The orange 'searches' piece has been growing steadily as there have been more posts for people to find. So far the post that has received the most search attention was my Five Books Every Student Should Read post. Apparently lots of people out there are looking for book recommendations.

The referrals piece is a bit over-represented, since it counts as a referral every time you click from one page of the blog to another, resulting in build-a-school.blogspot.com being by far my biggest referrer. In second place, though, is my friend Stacy at sassafrasmama.blogspot.com. She put up a link to me on her blog, and the clicks have been flowing in. As soon as I get organized enough to put together my own favorite links list, she'll be right at the top.

In terms of the stated goal of this blog, to refine my own thinking about what an ideal school would be like, I have just scratched the surface. What has surprised me the most in writing this blog is just how much there is to say about doing school right. Meanwhile, I am enjoying the journey and plan to keep working at this for a long time, so please join me in the conversation. I'd love to hear your thoughts.

Baby Got What?

What is it about math that inspires creativity in such a wide variety of genres? You've got TV shows from Square One to Numb3rs, movies like Pi, and books like Flatland. Really all that was missing was a strong musical presence.

And then there was this:

Baby Got Stats


Who knew Sir MixaLot was a mathematician?


Thanks to Eduwonkette for posting that one on her blog yesterday.

What Can Math Teach Us About Character?

In case you hadn't noticed, it's election time again. What do elections mean? Lots and lots of numbers. We have poll results, delegate counts, statistics of all different sizes and hues. For the next six months, the air will be unusually full of numbers. It will be left to the American voter to sort through all the numbers and come to a conclusion about what the right thing to do is. But how numbers literate is the American public?

Perhaps the defining moment for numbers in politics came in the first presidential debate in 2000. Al Gore spent much of the debate defending his positions with statistic after statistic, which Bush brushed aside with the phrase "fuzzy math," converting all that information into so many greenhouse gasses. (It turns out that "fuzzy math" and "fuzzy logic" are real things, but I don't think that's what Dubya meant.) This moment was, of course, indicative of the whole campaign in which the intellectual and analytical Gore was regularly stymied by Bush's appeal to people's common sense and values.

Personal opinions about el presidente aside, what Bush was playing on was the general impression that in the wrong hands, numbers can be made to show whatever we want them to. In this particular respect, he is not wrong. Because we expect numbers to be objective, we can be manipulated by themall the more easily, and it is not all that hard to make the numbers appear to show something. Bush's strategy for dealing with the problem (ignoring the numbers completely), is one way to handle this problem. (I leave it to the reader to decide how successful it has been.)

The opposite approach, and the one which I would advocate, is to educate ourselves to be good interpreters of numbers, to recognize when the numbers have been fudged, and when they are really telling us something. If we are going to be good citizens, we must also be good judges of information. We need to be able to figure out when someone is telling us the truth, and when they really are using "fuzzy math".

All you math teachers out there, I encourage you to spend some time with your students analyzing the numbers that are floating around out there these days. Help them decide for themselves what is real or what is not. Their decisions just might make a difference someday.

Have you seen any really bad math recently? I'm sure you have.

What Can You Do With Math?

What do you use math for in your everyday life?

As a teacher, my answer is: "to calculate percentages, lots and lots of percentages." I grade stuff, the student gets x out of a possible y, I write the resulting percentage at the top of the page, I take all those percentages and average them. Lather. Rinse. Repeat. Eventually I add weight to some of those percentages with other percentages (20% homework, 25% tests, etc.), and calculate yet another percentage that gets (abracadabra) turned into a letter. That's about the extent of my math life, and I could have done that kind of math back in middle school. So what were all my advanced math studies good for? (I got as far as Statistics and Multi-variable Calculus in college before I hit my math wall.)

I have stated before that in putting together a school, we should be questioning the value of everything in the curriculum. Math strikes me as being in the unusual position of being both of unquestioned value (of course math provides the tools that our students need to succeed in the modern world) and of above average forgetableness (second only to foreign language in the "I haven't used that since high school" rankings).

For people who end up using math in their careers, it is an invaluable skill, highly in demand in the widest variety of fields, from science to engineering to business and beyond. My friends who studied math in college left school with the world at their fingertips, and have gone on to wildly successful careers. For those of us who use only a much simpler set of mathematical skills, the rest of what we learned has often atrophied and begun to fall away. So what does this mean for math education in high school? How do we balance the students who will need a strong math background with those who may never do anything more complicated than basic arithmetic? For me, the answer lies in the larger philosophy of what a high school education should accomplish.

When I was filling out my college applications, checking the boxes about what I might choose to study when I got there, I said I was going to major in economics (math would have been real useful there). By the time I had to declare a major at the end of my Sophomore year, I chose psychology (I hear they use statistics for that) without ever having stepped inside an econ classroom. Six months later, I was adding Spanish as a second major, and headed down the path that would lead me to teaching. I loved my Spanish classes in high school, but never would have guessed that my career would involve Spanish, and certainly not teaching it. My wife, who is currently pursuing a PhD in biology, only took honors biology in high school because her mom made her.

My point is that very few of us have any idea at sixteen or seventeen what our futures have in store for us. In this age of many career changes, this strikes me as even more true. The job of high school should be to prepare us for the widest variety of possibilities and to provide us with as many skills as possible. Later in life we can decide which ones to allow to fade away with disuse. So, kids, go out and practice those derivatives. You never know when you may need them.

Have you used math today?