He's Back!

My favorite TED talk ever was Ken Robinson's message on How Schools Kill Creativity.  He's back with a call for learning revolution.  Bring it on!

He connects education with finding what you love to do.  Crazy talk.  Awesome Lincoln quote.  Dry British wit.  Poetry.  What more do you want from 18 minutes? 

Motivation

Good thing to be thinking about as school starts. I'm a bit skeptical about Dan Pink, but several people I know and respect have a high opinion of him. It feels sometimes like he's selling creativity.

But on his recent TED talk, he reports (link to his talk) some social psychology experiments that help me understand a big divide in teaching: incentives in classroom management. A simplification of his point would be that incentives work best on simple, direct tasks. On more challenging problems rewards don't work and, in fact, impede. What does work? Choice! Autonomy! (Conditions of Learning chalk up another point.)

Plus he's pretty entertaining.

Picture click leads to a Florida reading teacher site.

Ken Robinson Answers

I've written about Ken Robinson a few times (One and Two). The idea of creativity in mathematics was a sub-theme for my summer calculus class. Students at the end felt that some of the open-ended assignments (projects of their choice), non-standard problems (like the mobiles) and emphasis on problem solving helped open them up to creativity in math. But they suggested more specific demonstrations of how to be creative. (Boy, is that insightful.)

TED occasionally has question and answer sessions with their speakers who really ignited something with their presentation, and Sir Ken recently did this. (Here's the article.) He addresses math specifically:

"If you want to promote creativity, you need, firstly, to stimulate kids minds with puzzles and questions which will intrigue them. Often that's best done by giving them problems, rather than just solutions. What often happens in classrooms is, kids sit there trying to learn in a drone-like way things of not much interest that have already been figured out.

The best math teachers I know, like the best English teachers, are always giving kids puzzles. They're given things to work on where math skills are required but may not be the focus of the activity. There giving them problems to solve. Or they're made to engage with age-old mathematical problems. For example, I'm thinking about the problem of latitude. How do you go about measuring the planet? I mean, somebody had to do that. How do you do it? Professional mathematicians have such a cornucopia of fascinating puzzles, questions, proposals and conundrums. A great math teacher really has endless opportunities to stimulate kids minds and get them engaged with things they'd probably never thought about before. Rather than just giving them techniques." -Ken Robinson

It's not hugely original, but it's nice to get confirmation of things we believe from outside sources. He touches on engagement several times in the Q&A, and I do believe that's the central issue in teaching, and I love to ponder what is the key for math. Going to more and more of these reading conferences, I am insanely jealous of the teachers who talk about the book that turned a student on to reading. Problems don't seem to have the same effect.

For your listening and viewing pleasure

One of the many interesting ceiling panels.

Goals of Math Ed

Arthur Benjamin, self-proclaimed mathemagician and a very popular mathematician among teaching mathematicians, at TED on why calculus is not an appropriate pinnacle for math education. To be replaced by: discrete mathematics (statistics and probability).

Teacher Props
Taylor Mali, teacher/slam poet on What Teachers Make. One of my calc students shared this. As Mike warned me, I'll warn you: profanity.

Interesting glass floor and 6 or 7 story dome of the main rotunda.

Planning
An audio link from the new teacher resource center: an audio interview with Suzanne Lieurance, a teacher trainer and children's author, about planning in threes. There's a lot here that's compatible with workshop teaching, emphasis on assessment and evaluation and teaching for engagement. A form for note taking is in the post here.

The graphics are from the beautifully restored Michigan State Capitol that we visited this weekend, which include a couple of nice mathematical designs . Lots of nice 4-, 8- and 16-fold rotational symmetry. And much nice frieze-type translational symmetry, too. The architect was Elijah Meyers, and this was his crowning work.

Creativity in School

Remember about TED? I stumbled across Thomas Dolby's blog recently (I was a geek in the 80s, of course I like Dolby), and have been reading through back posts. He posted this link from TED that I thought was unreal. Ken Robinson is an expert on creativity, and funny besides. If Ricky Gervais had become an academic...

His point is about how we are born creative and educated out of it. An outside observer would think "The whole purpose of public education is to produce university professors." But he goes on to describe how we have convinced the majority of people that the things they are good at and interested in are not valued or even stigmatized.

So... what to do about it? I'm going to show this to my Calc 2 students on Monday and see what they think.

Inspirational Videos

If you haven't been there, you should try TED. (Technology, Entertainment, Design.)

While math is not their greatest area of stength, they do have a few insightful talks. Try these. Also or alternatively how we learn, especially Stuart Brown on play. Although somehow they missed Nate Silver. Get more Nate at his excellent blog, which covers the intersection of statistics and politics.

My favorite is about the nature of genius and creativity, though I think she's off by a smidgen. (Needs God/Holy Spirit in there. But who doesn't?)

It's basically impossible to watch everything on there that's worth watching. So if you see something worth it, let me know!