Download high quality here. See the pilot for instructions.

[I set off a hydrogen bomb on my blog with that last WCYDWT (since redacted, so if you don't know what I'm talking about, don't sweat it). Everything from a lousy audio transcode to Vimeo shutting down my account for violating its TOS. Sorry for the confusion.]

The conversation in my ILC recap has taken a few predictable turns, namely the one where I expect too much of presentations, that I need to lighten up on the presenters. I don't know how to relax my standards or if that's even a good idea. I do know how to distill everything I have ever enjoyed about any presentation into two steps. I don't care what your presentation covers; if you manage these, I will love it.

1. Unless your presentation is billed as "beginner-level" don't include information I can easily Google. What I mean is, while I know nothing about Photo Story, it was painful spending seat-time on a tutorial for adding narration to Photo Story, which is Google's top result for the same query. I can get that anytime¹.
2. Instead, cover the stuff I can't Google, that stuff that makes your presence worth my district's money and my time. Here's an easy outline: a) why Photo Story; what problem were you trying to solve? should I care about that problem? b) what complications did you encounter while implementing Photo Story? how did you overcome them? c) what did you learn?

This particular outline forces you to reckon with audience expectations and puts you in a position to satisfy them. It would have improved fourteen of the eighteen presentations² I attended at ILC³.

1. This was the most dissonant element of ILC. Half the presenters told me not to tell my kids stuff their steroidal smart phones could tell them. The other half were doing the opposite. [back]
2. None of which were about Photo Story, okay? [back]
3. Though this outline is useless if you turn your back to the audience and read aloud from a slide titled "What I Learned." [back]

or: My First Ed-Tech Conference
also: My Last Ed-Tech Conference

I'm back now from the Innovative Learning Conference in San Jose, CA. When I first bumped into Alice Mercer, she said, "This doesn't seem like your kind of thing." She's either right, and I'm just the wrong person for ILC, or else ILC should have stepped its game up in a lot of ways. Obviously, I'm biased toward the latter. Either way, I shouldn't have missed class time for this.

Therefore, a brief preface of ILC's good stuff and then my best advice for the presenters there. If you're reading this and you presented at ILC, obviously I'm not talking about you, or your session, etc., and hopefully you all realize by now that I reserve my harshest criticism for myself.

Preface

It was nice meeting Collette, Rushton, Alice, Gail, and some other folks; CUE organized the conference well, with the right number of sessions per day (five) at the right length (an hour, though some presenters didn't earn ten minutes); the catered lunch was fine, just fine.

That Said

In order to earn one seat-hour from a few dozen people, your presentation needs either:

• a compelling personality behind it;
• expertise, the sort of expertise DFW wrote about, the kind that has such a tight conceptual grasp, it can explain itself from any side, from any angle, from a macro- or microscopic lens;
• a compelling narrative, something with an antagonist, with obstacles to overcome, even if they're just stubborn network administrators; this is why I pinned my talk on math methods (back in the day) to a fictional student and gave her a photo;
• illustrative, complementary visuals; video, PowerPoint, handouts, makes no difference to me so long as they're pretty and useful;
• empathy for audience expectations, the sort of clairvoyance where you know what your audience is wondering, what it's waiting to see.

Fourteen of eighteen presentations I attended couldn't manage one of those.

There was the usual PowerPoint plague, presenters standing for thirteen minutes stock-still in front of a bulleted slide, that flat text often describing a highly visual concept¹, those bullet points often disregarding basic mechanical English².

As a guy who teaches compulsory Algebra to kids who have hated Algebra, I don't see how fourteen presenters managed to blow a scenario where an audience volunteered to attend their sessions. Where the audience is interested in the session (provided the presenter didn't falsely bill it). Where the audience is pulling for the presenter. Where the audience is eager to be dazzled, fed, or inspired.

ILC was like walking into eighteen car dealerships, pockets bulging with cash, declaring to every salesperson, "I'm here to buy," and discovering that fourteen of them couldn't close the sale.

Equivocations

I don't mean to be overly particular but what I saw this weekend was visual- and verbal illiteracy at a high level. I saw fourteen educated professionals put styrofoam on a plate, convinced it was steak. I want no part in that sorry transaction. I want to produce and consume the best I can while I still can.

I'm speaking at CMC-North in Monterey this December on how not to ruin entire classes with visual illiteracy. I realize it'll serve me right to have some punk kid out there in the audience, snarking about me on his blog and on Twitter.

All I can do is hold myself to this same standard.

Promoting Quality

If you're cool with some profanity and if you're even a little invested in the state of online gaming, check out this presentation from NY Tech Meet-Up. It did more to inspire, educate, and illustrate in five minutes and change than did the median presentation at ILC 2008.

NY Tech Meetup Presentation from Charles Forman on Vimeo.

1. There is no excuse for describing student video production with text bullets. Show video! [back]
2. ie. If you're going to shame yourself with bullet points, they should read (eg.) "Noun; Noun; Noun; Noun" not (eg.) "Noun; Noun; Noun; Past-Tense Verb." [back]

Martin Krzywinski's Lexical Analysis of 2008 US Presidential and Vice-Presidential Debates:

Please notice that Krzywinski didn't just copy and paste some text into Wordle's entry window and assume that the largest words somehow, magically, constituted theme. Wordle was one tool deployed in the service of much deeper analysis.

Previously Sniping:

1. Hackwork
2. Correct Me If I'm Wrong

Downes on the amateurish state of digital video online:

To me, what we are seeing reminds me of the early days of HTML, when some web pages were just awful. We rarely see that any more - not because people became better HTML programmers, but because the tools made HTML programming unnecessary. The same will be true of video.

This would be true if video production's tallest hurdle were technical, as it was when all these competent writers found a way past HTML programming with blogging. Rather, video's tallest hurdle is creative. Cheap hardware and simple software won't matter a bit if you don't know where to put the camera or where to put that edit.

Stephen's outlook on digital video struck me as overly sanguine last November. A year later, having completed just ten videos with dy/av, I can report that no form of creative expression has been so difficult, or so satisfying.

Chris Dede just played this video in his early-bird seminar here at Innovative Learning without apparent irony:

I mean did anybody see The Devil Wears Prada?! Anne Hathaway went insane from the non-stop multi-tasking. Is it too much to ask for a little restraint even as we prepare our students to compete with the Chinese / Indian economic menace, etc.? Where's Dina.

In an astonishingly wise appropriation of tech funds, my district is paying its own teachers to conduct tech seminars for other teachers. I signed up for a block of three tutorials on maximizing digital projector use in the classroom. I have way too much material for this workshop.

But my district's curriculum coordinator assigned me a workshop called "Web 2.0 for Mathematics Instruction" unaware that my c.v. here is positively larded with skepticism about this place where your Internets and my Maths coincide, a place which you have sworn exists. I have no material for this workshop.

Neither, apparently, do the ed-tech institutions. Vicki Davis retweeted this from Dianne Krause the other day:

Leigh Ann Sudol's response, that this blog represents some kind of coincidence of Web 2.0 and math, is even more disconcerting:

Far from representing the read-write web's effect on math instruction, this blog remains perpetually befuddled by it.

So before I cancel this workshop (for which I never volunteered in the first place) I'll put Vicki and Dianne's question out here: does anybody have any examples of Web 2.0 technology transforming math instruction?

I'm particularly interested in methods specific to math. Tell me my students can collaborate over a conceptual wiki, or Skype with another country over project-based learning, or blog their class notes, and you'll find my attention wandering. These techniques could enhance a class on auto repair, I realize, but the farther you wander away from the liberal arts towards my room, the more their returns diminish.

Postscript:

Though Scott has yet to release his 2008 survey of the edublogosphere (which *cough* will only be a year outdated this January) I have seen some of the early infographs and they confirm that the loudest voices on the matter of ed-tech don't teach and, furthermore, don't teach math:

Time was, I'd recommend Darren Kuropatwa as the go-to guy for math instruction using read-write technology but I pay my taxes more often than he blogs.

So where are the Web 2.0-enabled math teacher bloggers?

There's nothing in this world more fun to teach than proportional reasoning. I mean, if you can't make magic out of proportions, check yourself into math teacher rehab or something, 'cause you're missing the view.

Two things:

1. The fact is that many successful people couldn't pass a summative Algebra exam. I wouldn't give my principal or my superintendent — both smart, successful people — good odds in a fight with a quadratic equation. So why do I teach this stuff?
2. This question pounds at me a little harder with this year's remedial Algebra group which, on an individual student average, has seen more hard time than I have in twice their years. I understand that passing Algebra and (by prerequisite) graduating high school increases one's earning potential, etc., but what kind of sales pitch is that to a kid who's raising himself and his sister and who is, at fourteen, a high-functioning alcoholic, who is, right now, feeling pretty proud of himself for just catching the metro line to school. How am I supposed to tell this kid to solve for x? Needless to say, when you're dealing with a kid who very literally has nothing left to lose, you've also gotta rethink your usual set of motivators.
   

   

The Bone Collector from Dan Meyer on Vimeo.

Download high quality here. See the pilot for instructions.

The math here is fairly self-evident (I think) but I'm really curious how you'd deploy this in the classroom. Be specific.

BTW: Mr. Follett — concise and correct:

(1) Play clip.
(2) Pass out the photograph, I’d get this by doing a screen grab.
(3) Make other materials available: dollar bills, rulers
(4) Make this info available.
(5) Ask them the shoe size.
(6) Discuss, reflect, justify.

This is, more or less, exactly how it went in Algebra for us this week. Here is the relevant frame grab formatted as a 4×6 frame.

You people. That's what you are.

Maybe this series has stronger legs than I originally though, particularly with ELA guys like Tom, Christian, and Todd dropping by to push what I figured to be a math-only prompt through their own content-area strainer.

There are too many awesome bits to summarize, frankly, but from just two pictures you people posted lesson plans for combinatorics, population growth models, graphic design, racial profiling, optical character recognition, regression, the Freedom of Information Act, and that's just what's fit to print. Some of the other suggestions were downright hope-your-administrator-doesn't-stop-by-that-day crazy.

So we'll try this again. Two things I'm kicking around in the interim:

What Kind Of Model Is This?

Mike:

This conversation is on the verge of a Lesson Study. With some focused organization and implementation, this could turn into a model for the future of teaching and learning about student learning.

Maybe.

How Do Textbooks Manage To Blow This?

Briefly:

1. Using clip-art (if that) where photography is the prescription.
2. Establishing a too-narrow framework for how students (and teachers) experience media. The hypothetical is this: if I had put those photos up with an explicit question (ie. "how long until Costa Rica runs out of license plate numbers?") would any of that other zany fun have occurred to you? Would it have occurred to your students? Far better to project a full-color, unmodified, uninflected image on the board with a) a clear idea where you want it to go and b) the courage and humility to let it go somewhere else¹.

Textbooks suck at this. They're perfect for below-average teachers with limited imagination and limited love for their own content areas, the sort that need a pick axe, a shovel, and a map to the goldmine handed to them before it'll occur to them to start digging.

It's kind of an indictment that this has been such a profitable business model for so long.

1. I swear I don't even sound like myself sometimes. [back]

A Costa Rican License Plate

An American License Plate

What Can You Do With This?

See the pilot for instructions. Click each thumbnail for the high-res still. See you in the comments.

My take on digital media in the classroom, the next-gen lecturer, went ultra-viral last summer, tripling up on Did You Know?, and making Sir Ken Robinson wish he never paid attention to his YouTube stats, etc.

Responding to demand, I'd like to serialize the video into an ongoing series called What Can You Do With This?, the structure of which will go like this:

1. I will post a digital photo or some digital video. I will do this without elaboration.
2. We will take to the comments and angle ourselves at the best possible use of that media in a classroom setting, which use, I predict, will be superior to the one I originally imagined.

At the very least, we will find in these (high-res, DRM-free) media a better way to introduce material than whatever "real world" contrivance your textbook recommends. At best, we will train our eyes to find our content areas in the world around us, becoming better teachers in the process.

Dina Strasser, my blogroll's token hippie, intent on outdoing Piaget himself, doesn't merely let her students create rules for themselves, she asks them to create rules for her:

Among them were the hysterical ("Coffee breath. Could you people please chew some gum?"), the horrifying ("I hate it when teachers have long conversations on their cell phones in the middle of class"), the obvious ("I hate it when the teacher punishes the whole class for someone one person has done"), and this near unanimous statement: We hate it when the teacher deliberately embarrasses us in front of our peers.

Dina's narrative of success and failure is well worth your time.

[comments closed]

The University of California, Santa Cruz, e-mailed my department last week looking to match its student teachers with mentors. New teacher training inspires me more than anything lately so I e-mailed my department head looking for his endorsement. No response.

We examined last year's assessment data at the next department meeting. Good, not great, and as fully one-sixth of my department, I must shoulder a good amount of blame for my time-sucking, standards-unaligned Feltron Project, which sunk a lot of my Geometry students, I'm positive. The fact is this: if we post the same growth this year as we did the last, we won't make Adequate Yearly Progress, putting us a year away from Program Improvement.

The department head acknowledged that, yes, mentoring novice teachers is an essential part of this job but, at this critical time, we need better than novices in our classrooms. He didn't shut the door but gave us all good reason to do it ourselves.

I can't really square this aspect of NCLB with my conviction that its problems (and we likely disagree on what constitutes "its problems") result of poor implementation, not of policy itself.

I can see how simply absolving student teachers of any obligation to adequate yearly progress would lead to all sorts of awful scheduling, mendacious administrators assigning the most needy students to the most inexperienced teachers.

I can't see what NCLB is doing to the onerous process of training new teachers except to make it more onerous.

To recap, this is the first year my school has built a thirty minute advisory period into its weekly schedule. But we're five weeks into the school year and our advisory binder still has us untangling human knots, breaking ice between students who have known each other longer than I have known my wife¹.

So we're veering wildly off script but the product hasn't been too ugly. The same kid who called this the most pointless class on her schedule at the start of the year just last week volunteered it as the highlight of her Wednesdays.

What we've been about the last few weeks:

1. We voted on a name for advisory period. The finalists were: a) Purple People Eaters, b) Wombats, and c) Buhemoth, from which Buhemoth was selected somewhat, um, un-democratically. (For the record, my student didn't intend the misspelling but we all took it with an anti-establishment post-spelling stance like, "Yeah, we know, and we don't care².")
2. We brainstormed a logo/mascot for Buhemoth. The exploratory committee first suggested adjectives that best described (to them) the essence of Buhemoth. We decided on "fierce" and "terrifying" while rejecting "cuddly" and "sensual." (I swear.) The logo status is "in process."
3. We researched designs for our cardboard regatta competition³ with a few YouTube queries. Perhaps you've heard that Jon Pedersen (not the one you're thinking about) and I won this competition at Ukiah High School, circa. 2000. This nation would not see the kind of intense, brother-waged-against-brother controversy that surrounded our boat design until Ohio, circa. 2004. Gonna be really difficult, in other words, to keep my mouth shut and let my students take full ownership of the design process.
4. We ate doughnuts.

Next up:

1. We will push our logo process along by viewing a montage of contemporary logos and classifying them as "Buhemoth" or "Not Buhemoth."
2. We will create a "Buhemoth code", drawing on the Mafia's recently revealed ten commandments for inspiration⁴.
3. In general, we will stay as far away from the binder as possible.

1. Nods at Chris. [back]
2. cf. Wyld Stallyns. [back]
3. Relegated to a footnote since I'm positive 99% of this blog's audience knows what I'm talking about: you are allowed two rolls of duct tape and unlimited cardboard to make a boat that will conduct a student across a school pool. Prizes for fastest time, etc. [back]
4. I mean, or not, if that's a totally stupid idea. [back]

Sup Teach?, a group edublog for new teachers, is the sort of blog you toss in your feedreader to keep your eye on that incoming link you received the other day but which, even though it's ramshackle and scattered (the category list in the sidebar includes "king koopa" and "slaying dinosaur-esque turtles," for no obvious reason) you can't bring yourself to unsubscribe, simply because it's too much fun.

Consider "When expletives lead to memorable teaching moments":

Student 1: "Miss S., you look pretty today!"

Ms. S: "Why? Do I usually look nerdy?"

Student 2: "No, I dunno where you got that."

Student 3: "She always looks pretty, dumbass. I like your vest Ms. S."

Ms. S.: "Ladies and gentlemen, we do not use that compound word in my class. BUT…it's compound words ROLL OUT TIME!"

Student 5: "Bittersweet!"

Student 6: "Basketball!"

Student 7: "Bathroom!"

Student 8: "Sunset!"

Student 9: "Redwood."

Ms. S.: "Redwood?!"

Student 9: "Yea, it was in our pop quiz yesterday, remember?"

Ms. S.: "OH. Yea."

Gah. Too fun. Reminds me of when I was a new teacher, and young, so long ago.

Brian Cormier:

I played [math basketball] today in class. Class versus the teacher. When I told them I never lose, this was all the motivation they needed.

This kind of hyper-authoritative faux-confidence informs at least 50% of my student-teacher interaction, letting me acknowledge to them that, yeah, I realize this particular lame-duck teacher is real, that I don't like them any more than my students do, letting me have some cake and eat it too. We get along.

This frosty slap to the face is courtesy our source deep inside Education Trust - West. For the record, I find this data overwhelming, and overwhelmingly depressing, and not half as insignificant as half my blogroll will claim it is.

Josh Dean, NYT editor, explaining DFW's particular literary gift:

But the thing that always struck me was that he could sizzle your synapses with intelligence and insight and literary pyrotechnics, but you didn't need to read his sentences twice. They were brilliant and also colloquial. How he pulled that off is a literary voodoo I might never understand.

Kathleen Fitzpatrick, DFW's Pomona College colleague, letting me pimp my favorite author and my favorite tv show all in the same post:

He was, in fact, extremely fond of The Wire — he stopped me in the hall one day last year and said, look, I really want to sit down and pick your brain about this, because I'm really developing the conviction that the best writing being done in America today is being done for The Wire. Am I crazy to think that?

David Foster Wallace, himself, explaining his respect for and the essence of good teaching:

It might be that one of the really significant problems of today’s culture involves finding ways for educated people to talk meaningfully with one another across the divides of radical specialization. That sounds a bit gooey, but I think there’s some truth to it. And it’s not just the polymer chemist talking to the semiotician, but people with special expertise acquiring the ability to talk meaningfully to us, meaning ordinary schmoes. Practical examples: Think of the thrill of finding a smart, competent IT technician who can also explain what she’s doing in such a way that you feel like you understand what went wrong with your computer and how you might even fix the problem yourself if it comes up again. Or an oncologist who can communicate clearly and humanly with you and your wife about what the available treatments for her stage-two neoplasm are, and about how the different treatments actually work, and exactly what the plusses and minuses of each one are. If you’re like me, you practically drop and hug the ankles of technical specialists like this, when you find them. As of now, of course, they’re rare. What they have is a particular kind of genius that’s not really part of their specific area of expertise as such areas are usually defined and taught. There’s not really even a good univocal word for this kind of genius—which might be significant. Maybe there should be a word; maybe being able to communicate with people outside one’s area of expertise should be taught, and talked about, and considered as a requirement for genuine expertise.

Sorry if this place gets a little funereal or mushy as I push through a lot of interviews, a lot of eulogies, and his entire published body of work. You should start with Shipping Out: On the (nearly lethal) comforts of a luxury cruise, recently made available free online by Harper's Magazine.

I was digging through the dy/dan mailbag today and found a note asking me to explain what I have often referenced on this blog but never clarified. I swear, there isn't any activity my kids enjoy more than basketball review. Here's how it works:

Instructions

1. You bring in a set of questions related to the previous two week's instruction.
2. You put up a question.
3. A kid stands up with an answer, either correct or incorrect:
   • If it's incorrect, the student sits down, reworks the problem, and you wait for another student to stand.
   • If it's correct, the student takes two shots with a miniature basketball into a lined trashcan. You award points according to a) the student's distance from the trash can, and b) the competitive mode you've selected below.
4. Repeat.

Competitive Modes

I have used four, each with their own recommendations. Listed in descending order of popularity:

1. Class v. Teacher. The students take two shots for every right answer. The teacher takes one shot for every wrong answer. Highest point total wins either extra credit (for the class) or bragging rights (for the teacher).
2. Class v. Class. One side of the class versus the other. Seed them by mathematical and athletic ability. Highest point total wins extra credit for their team.
3. Free Market Capitalism. Everyone for him- or herself. Good for the final minutes of class. A student receives as many extra credit points (or pieces of candy) as he or she can score.
4. Class v. Arbitrary Point Total. If you're averse to classroom competition, let the class play as one, studying and shooting to pass an arbitrary point total.

Other Release Notes

• Have the students turn in a paper with all their work on it. I make a big deal about this so everyone works the math through even if they don't all shoot. Toss these papers after the last student leaves.
• Encourage shy students to answer math questions and pass off the ball to another student if they don't want to shoot.
• Once a student successfully answers a question, she can't answer again until the rest of her team answers, though she must still work through the problems.
• Introduce an extraordinarily difficult and extraordinarily valuable shot halfway through the term, a 20-point shot through an open window, for instance.
• In between the math review, toss in some extraneous nonsense. Name that flag, for instance.
  
  

  You can find these slides anywhere "basketball" is listed in my Geometry supplement.

I subscribe to eighty-something education blogs which push me several dozen posts per day and yet my reader goes these through long, arid stretches — nothing but conference session recaps, pie-in-the-sky tech idealism, policy wonks talking over each other, endless unedited malformations from people (teachers) who probably oughtta know better — where nothing manages to connect even loosely to my practice, where nothing manages to connect even loosely to my experience as a teacher.

Todd Seal's post, No Idea, cut through all that blogospheric flotsam tonight like an arc torch and left me nodding my head, mumbling "yeah, uh huh, yeah," at my iPhone as I waited in line for my wife to make a return at Urban Outfitters. Wherever you can find it, right?

Todd:

When I close that door, I’m on my own. I’ve got fifty-three minutes with a group of thirty kids who want entertainment if they want anything. I need to take those kids wherever they are and help them improve by the time they walk out the door. I need to give them at least one new idea today and one reason to come back tomorrow.

I have no idea what I’m doing.

The stuff that makes you believe in blogs again.

"Okay, think of a color, any color," I said. It was advisory and we were supposed to discuss Rachel's Challenge, the recent all-school assembly.¹. One moment later I called on Jen.

"Jen, what color are you thinking of?"

"Blue." she said.

"Okay." I pointed at Mara right next to her. "What color is Mara thinking of?"

Jen shrugged.

I'm not sure this moment did anything for my kids but it helped me understand why high schoolers find it so easy to tear the meat from each other's bones so often.

1. A program for which I have no end of conflicting opinions and unresolved questions, such as (i) is there something fundamentally cheap, exploitative, and contradictory in attaching explicit footage of the Columbine massacre to a feel-good message of being nice to people and Pay[ing] It Forward? (ii) is that message worth more, less, or the same amount of my time after the girl who wrote it up in a school essay was murdered? (iii) if a student hasn't assimilated these basic elements of kindness by high school, can a school assembly scare her straight, so to speak? can the Rachel's Challenge wristband? can the supplementary posters? does that kind of change last? (iv) what do the passages of the assembly celebrating Rachel herself (eg. Rachel was posthumously awarded a national kindness award, her father has met the last two Presidents, etc.) have to do with anything? [back]

Some visual material my classes and I have enjoyed recently:

Video

• The opposite of sucking on helium.
• High speed skateboarding down Claremont Canyon in Berkeley, CA.
• A shockingly elegant skateboard reel, the first thirty seconds of which are required viewing for my graduate course in vodcasting. The silhouette photography makes the rest of it eminently watchable also¹.
• Mushrooms and mold growing very quickly.
• A UK schoolgirl breaks a Guinness World Record for balancing the most snails on her face at one time, remains unkissed for decades, inspires several of my students to take up snail hunting.

Photo

• We've been on something of an Iceland kick lately.
• Plus Dubai, and the Burj, the tallest skyscraper in the world.
• Brittny Badger rips appliances apart and puts 'em under glass. Probably tore the wings off flies as a kid too. (I mean, maybe she did, maybe she didn't. Is it so wrong to suggest she did? Just tossing it out there. Maybe the voting public picks it up. Maybe I clean up the next news cycle. Can't hurt to try.)

1. Sorry, but I have to make sure you understand how valuable it is that my RSS reader has pushed me a skateboarding reel which my students — some of which students will insist they have seen every skateboarding reel released to DVD or YouTube — have never seen. Or how much classroom management capital it buys me that I can point to a specific shot — sincerely — as my favorite, that I can ask them — sincerely — for their favorite. Wish my ed classes had included some coursework in "Pedagogically Profitable Ways To Kill Time." [back]

David Foster Wallace hanged himself last night. DFW did more for contemporary non-fiction, more for the travelogue genre, and more to ignite my own writing than any author I can recall. His commencement address at Kenyon College exactly summarizes how I try to live out my day-to-day, a fact which makes his suicide all the more puzzling, and tragic. I'll miss his writing a lot.

Francesca Ochoa, retiring teacher:

The "new" focus is on `drill and grill', test-taking skills and a largely prescribed curriculum. The classroom has become a training center reminiscent of the era of de jure segregation where Mexican-American and other students of color were expected to regurgitate memorized material, thus preparing them for jobs in the lower rungs of society.

Sir Michael Barber, education reform strategist:

if the implementation is poor, people will say the whole act was a bad idea and the true opportunity it provides will be lost. If that happened, it would be lost for a generation, and America can't afford that. I think that's the biggest risk to the American system in the next two to three years.

As the school year opened, our principal asked us to consider a hypothetical kid who bungled her way through a composition class only to ace the final exam — an essay final which assessed every skill from the year. He asked us to indicate what grade we'd give her with a show of hands.

Mine was the only hand for "A," which, whatever, I suppose I should admit my biases more often. One teacher indicated an "F" and the rest spread themselves out pretty uniformly across the other passing grades. My philosophy is that it doesn't matter how hard you try, it matters what you can do¹ and it doesn't matter when in the semester you prove what you can do.

I can accept conflicting opinions on this to an extent, especially when the consequences only involve my principal's hypothetical unicorn-student, but I get really, really bothered when you assign real, flesh-and-blood students to my remedial algebra class who, by all anecdotal accounts, know algebra backward, forward, left, and right, who scored proficient or higher on their state assessments, but who didn't feel like completing your tear-out cookie-cutter homework assignments.

For which you failed them and assigned them to my remedial class, where they are now bored, unchallenged, and where — believe me — they really resent you.

What is your homework worth?

1. It is also my duty to establish a class where how hard you try correlates directly to what you can do. [back]

In trying to teach really difficult material — so, math, or any math-based science, I guess — the look of the material rivals the material itself for importance.

The weird thing I realized while breaking several traffic laws on the way to work this morning is that there are no large design decisions. Even when the look of the thing changes drastically — from one field to its inverse, for example — the decision was small, the action simple.

Which Is Clearer?

Why It Matters

This makes graphic design a defining aspect of my teaching philosophy, something indicative of the larger whole. My enthusiasm for design points at my belief that small decisions lead to exponential gains, that the sum of my small color, opacity, and alignment choices will lead to a huge net win for my kids, that the math will be exponentially clearer, that we'll unwaste huge stores of time.

Video Is King

Therefore, if I had unlimited time and capital to create a curriculum, I'd use video, because with video, you make those incremental decisions thirty times every second. If those decisions are made carelessly, of course, the result will be utterly disastrous, turgid, limp, and boring — a medium unearned — as I'm sure you've witnessed. The inverse is also true, though, and that awareness is now taking me down some interesting paths.

w/r/t my assertion that many students want to know right away if you like them or hate them, that they want to know so fast they're willing to provoke a response:

I got one the first day. A kid came in clowning hard, looking to assert real fast what he was about, looking to find out what I was about. He was obviously in the business of rattling teachers.

I'm not saying I know how this is going to end but I know how I wasn't going to let it begin. Out of twenty-four students in class, his was the only name I knew. Yet when I was running down the roster taking attendance, I asked his name just like any other. I wasn't going to give him any celebrity. I wasn't going to let him know his circus-act even registered.

This trained obliviousness doubles as a legitimate instructional strategy. Running through some whiteboard exercises with my students, students tossed answers out impulsively — looking to keep the effort-gratification cycle spinning quickly. Their answers were often correct, but I felt them reading me, gauging my eyes and mouth for some indication they had scored.

If I hesitated even a moment, they'd reverse themselves or default to their next, on-deck guess. At that point I'd issue a look, one which I'll issue maybe a hundred million billion times over the course of this school year. It reads like this:

At that point their second-guessing begins in earnest. Problems are re-worked and arguments erupt only to find when the dust settles and the rubble clears that their first answers were correct.

At the end of this first fortnight, I'm realizing how well this affectation works with students, how at the end of the school year they'll take five or six more seconds on a problem — an eternity by the standards of a 14-yo — reworking even the easy ones, and then when I issue that look, they'll tell me to cram it, insisting on their first answer because they earned it.

I'm also realizing with this new group of students exactly how tight last year's class and I became, and something else which is nice to realize and never a guarantee: that the time we spent together wasn't meaningless.

… a teacher's true effectiveness should not be linked to a teacher's right to renew his or her license.

—the Washington Teachers' Union, a letter to its members. [The Quick And The Ed]

I'm uninterested in resurrecting last month's Million Comment March, or discussing She Who Must Not Be Named, or her policies, or their motivations, or their financiers (but if you absolutely must) I'm just curious what in the history of organized labor has led teachers' unions to formally announce what amounts to a collective and colossal dereliction of duty.

Among other guiding principles for this Internet timesuck I call dy/dan, this has been the enduring hope: that if I'm as transparent as possible, as honest as possible, and if I upload as many supplemental materials as possible, then you and I can turn losses into wins.

So yesterday I posted my entire Geometry curriculum online: geometry.mrmeyer.com.

The whole year. 1.94 gigabytes. Every lesson plan. Every handout. 2,144 slides — flavored in Keynote, PowerPoint, and PDF.

I hope you can use this or, at least, that you know someone who can use this, in which case, please pass it along.

Bored. I'm so bored of these.

For those who were around back when I wrote my anti-homework manifesto, lemme confess: I'm assigning homework now. Two problems every day — one tough, the other tougher — choose between them, same grade value for each.

Our block schedule inspired my not-quite-180° reversal, the fact that my kids go 48 hours between classes and need some kind of interim refresher. Kids are still cool 'cause I'm not indiscriminately assigning #1 - 30 (odd, of course). Parents still haven't made their minds up about it.

Regardless: you win, homework.

Dean Shareski posted an interview over at his Ideas and Thoughts covering my summer-long vodcasting series, dy/av. Since the guy is like Lesley Stahl with a Skype mic, I went back through the archives to prep myself. I cringed at moments I didn't expect and found some moments more durable than others.

More of my public navel gazing:

Defining The Structure

I knew I wanted the episodes to land between two and three minutes (though even that proved too long for some of y'all), to feature three words in the title, to close with my blog's plucky little tagline in voiceover, and I wanted to shoot in a 16×9 aspect ratio (think HDTV, not your old 4×3 TV tube) because the thinner rectangle lets you balance your composition in fun ways, packing useful elements into both sides of the screen.

For example:

The structure evolved in the editing room. For better or worse, I started adding a short, silent cutaway before the final line, an effort at ratcheting up the drama before the close.

Cringeworthy

Throughout the ten episodes, I felt too somber and too portentous by nine-tenths. Nowhere is that more apparent than in the seventh episode, which I shot on two different days. One day I'm more or less my ornery, ebullient self, the other I'm kind of staring and speaking at the camera like I think I'm Jesus. I only kept a consistent, accurate tone in the ninth episode, which, of course, was the last episode with any monologue.

Oh, and the cutaway in the office episode where I try to conjure Jim Halpert just didn't work.

Audience Interaction

I shot the behind-the-scenes episode three times, each reshoot modified by your inquiries into the process. Aside from that, the production time (averaging out at 14-ish hours per episode) prohibits the kind of post/comment/followup feedback blog posts enjoy. Once I shot an episode, only a monster incentive would reset the process.

My Least Favorite Episode

The behind-the-scenes episode, the visual core of which (the parallel shots of creating lessons and creating vodcasts) disintegrated halfway through. The last thirty seconds are particularly painful for me to watch as I murmur several passages which would've been better served by simple a blog post.

Favorite Flourishes

In carver's classroom management, I mention how "I always, always took discipline personally." I visually italicized the second "always," with a slo-mo shot of Carver on top of the police cruiser chopping at the air, a shot you'd already seen at regular speed.

It lasts less than a second and underlines everything I believe about the strength of video.

Oh: the eyebrow in episode seven.

Also: "graham crackers and wiki hour."

The Hardest Part About Editing Videos You've Spent Months Brainstorming, Writing, And Shooting

Forcing yourself to watch and listen to your story through the eyes and ears of someone totally unfamiliar with it, a hypothetical viewer. I found it really easy to cut too much, having grown deathly bored hearing myself say "My name is Dan and I like to teach."¹

The Least Watched Episode

dy/av : 007 : the motiongraphics episode, which was also my favorite, illustrating my connection to the content I have spent my professional life teaching.

The Most Watched Episode

The most watched episode was dy/av : 002 : the next-gen lecturer, the popularity of which surprised and, frankly, annoyed the hell outta me. I paced the ten episodes according to which ones I felt would play like gangbusters and which I felt would lull an audience appropriately. Turns out I have no idea what any of you people are into.

Watching it again, I'm really happy with how I edited the classroom conversation into the video, a conversation which includes so many aspects of teaching I'll cherish long after I stop teaching.

Nielsen Ratings

My Most Flameworthy Assertion In Dean's Interview

"Video at its best is better than writing at its best."

Essential Vodcasting Skills

Dean asked me to define the skills essential to this vodcasting gig. There is only one. It is common to good speechwriting, good storytelling, and good teaching: increase the bandwidth. More throughput. Say more, just as clearly, with less.

For video that requires two specific skills:

1. Use the blade. Edit the dead air from your shots. Cut the passages that don't serve the point of your video. It's just like the delete key with blogging, only harder. (In fact, if you can't wield the delete key adequately in your blogging, rethink video.)
2. Layer video. Is there something so special about how you look when you talk that you need to show yourself talking? Show something else — something informative, illustrative, or (for humor) contradictory — while your voice fills the background.

You can find my best throughput in the coffehouse scene from episode ten, where I split two complementary angles while at the same time layering audio from the next scene for a smooth transition.

It's my best work of ten episodes.

1. Zadie Smith sez: write it and put it in a drawer. [back]

Nicholas Felton is a graphic design working in New York City who, every year since 2005, has produced an annual report — everything from where he traveled to what he drank — using infographics which I'm pretty sure he stole from my math classes. His work inspired this blog's annual report contest, which you'll see again at the end of 2008. His annual report also inspired my classroom assignment, The Feltron Project. After struggling with my students to reproduce his accomplishment, I had several questions, which Felton was gracious enough to answer.

Dan Meyer: Can you describe your workflow, from (eg) a day's subway ride to its appearance as an infograph in your final report? What hardware and software shows up along the way?

Nicholas Felton: As I'm in front of my computer for most of the day, I use the mac's calendar application to keep track of all the day-to-day statistics. I arrive in the office, and immediately note anything of importance from the night before and the current morning. If I am away from the machine, or I am accumulating too many specific notes to keep track of, I will use the notepad in my mobile phone to write them down, or email them to myself. If I'm travelling, I tend to use my sketchbook to keep tabs on everything, which I will later enter into the calendar. For more infrequent activities, I also keep running lists in excel or on backpackit.com.

Throughout 2007, I also kept monthly maps of Brooklyn and Manhattan on which I traced the streets I walked each day.