Taking Stock

I spent 5 hours today cleaning out my desk, going through files, recycling mountains of paper. In concrete terms, it means school is over. Graduation is tomorrow. And then: I’m on summer vacation [1]. So now a bit of a brain dump as I take stock.

I’ve found this year to be an important transition point:

For the first time, I taught ninth graders, and for the first time, I taught geometry. And in order to do that, I worked an insane number of hours with my partner-in-crime and co-teacher BK in order to write an entire curriculum from scratch, from head to toe. Yup, you read that right. We — in essence — wrote a textbook. We sequenced the course, we wrote materials and designed activities for the course, and we had kids do all the heavy lifting. There are particular moments as a teacher which standout as “big moments.” Moments where we know we’ve developed immensely as a teacher. Transitioning from individual and partner work into total groupwork was one of those moments. Converting my non-AP calculus course into a standards based grading course was one of those moments. And writing a curriculum from scratch, in a single year, with an insanely thoughtful collaborator was the most recent of those moments [2].

The previous two years (before this school year) were two of the hardest years I’ve had as a teacher. We teachers were called on to do a lot in the wake of our school’s five year strategic plan — and it became overwhelming. I had no work-life balance. And  I became a bit curmudgeonly because of those tough years. But this year, things have been better. I still have no work-life balance, but the overwhelming onslaught of initiatives have subsided. One of the things I did to actively try to stay positive this year was to write down every single day one good thing that happened to me — big or small. From the first day of classes to the last. And those things are archived here. This was especially important because at the start of the school year, my mom was diagnosed with cancer (she is doing very well, fyi, no worries).

That being said, I am going to make a goal: that next year, I am going to just let the things that I can’t control go… There’s no point in getting worked up over something that you can’t do anything about. Instead, I’m going to stay loose, and bring back my frivolity and humor, and go off the beaten path in class more. While organizing today, I was looking through a number of old emails and cards from students, and saw so many inside jokes and fun times that they references… and then I thought about this year… and I came up blank. I couldn’t think of a time that I doubled over laughing in class. I couldn’t think of an ongoing joke that I had with a student. I could think of great lessons and a ha moments, but nothing frivolous and fun. So my vow is to make sure that next year involves more joy and laughter. For me, and for my studentsEvery day.

Wow, yes, this braindump led me to something big. With that, I’m out.

[1] That doesn’t mean I’m done with school. I have lucky 13 college recommendations to write. And two summer projects that each will take 25 hours each to complete (revise my multivariable calculus curriculum; plan for our new schedule next year with longer blocks).

[2] I’ve written entire course curricula before. Calculus, for example. But that took a few years to write and get added to. And Adv. Precalculus, which I did in a single year, but lacked the collaboration and innovation that I was able to do this year with BK.

Multivariable Calculus Projects 2014-2015

At the end of each year in Multivariable Calculus, I have students develop and execute their own “final project.” It’s fairly open-ended and students end up finding something they are personally interested/invested in and they go for it.

This year I had six students and these are their projects.

“Exploring the Normal Distribution Through the Box-Muller Transform and Visualizing It Using Computer Science” (GT)

This student had never taken a statistics course but was interested in that. We also talked about how to find the area under the normal distribution using multivariable calculus (and showed it was 1). Armed with those two things, this student who likes computer science found a way to pick independently two numbers (one each from two uniform distributions), and have them undergo a few transformations involving square roots and sine/cosines, and then those two numbers would generate two new numbers. Doing this a bunch of times will create a whole pile of new numbers, and it turns out that those square roots and sine/cosines somehow create a bunch of numbers that exactly follow a normal distribution. So weird. So cool.

“XRayField: Detecting Minecraft Cheating using Physics and Calculus” (W.M.)

This student loves Minecraft and hosts a Minecraft server where tons of kids at our school play. Earlier in the year, there was a big scandal because there were people cheating when playing on this server — using modifications to give themselves additional advantages. (This was even chronicled by the school newspaper.) One of the modifications allows players to see where the diamonds are hidden, so they can dig right to them. So this student who runs the server wanted to find a way to detect cheaters. So he created a force field around each diamond (using the inverse square law in 3D), and then essentially calculated the work done by the force field on the motion of a player. A player moving directly with the force field (like on the left in the image above) will get a higher “work score” than someone on the right (which is moving sometimes with the forcefield, sometimes not). In other words, he’s calculating a line integral in a field. His data was impressive. He had some students cheat to see what would happen, and others not. And in this process, he even caught a cheater who had been cheating undetected. Honestly, this might be one of my favorite projects of all time because of how unique it was, and how perfectly it fit in with the course.

“Space Filling Curves” (L.S.)

This student with a more artistic bent was interested by “Space Filling Curves” (we saw some of them when I started talking about parametric curves in three dimensions, and we fiddled around with Lissajous curves to end up with some space filling curves). This student created three art pieces. The first was a 2D Hilbert curve which is space filling. The second was a 3D Hilbert curve which is space filling (pictured above). The third was writing a computer program to actually generate (live) a space filling curve which involves a parametrically defined curve, where each of the x(t) and y(t) equations involved an infinite sum (where each term in this infinite sum was reliant on this other weird piecewise and periodic function). I wish I had a video showing this program execute in real time, and how it graphed for us — live — a curve which was drawing itself and how that curve being drawn truly filled space. It blew my mind.

“The Math Is Right: The Math Behind Game Shows” (J.S.)

This student, since a young age, loved watching the Game Show Network with his mother. So for his final project, he wanted to analyze game shows — specifically Deal or No Deal, and the big wheel in the Price is Right. I had never thought deeply about the mathematics of both, but he addressed the question: “When should you take the deal? Is there an optimal time to do so?” (with Deal or No Deal) and “If you’re the second player spinning the big wheel (out of three players), how do you decide whether to spin a second time or not?” (for the Price is Right). As I saw him work through this project — especially the Price is Right problem — I saw so much rich mathematics unfold, involving generating functions, combining distributions, and simulating. It’s a deceptively simple question, with a beautifully rich analysis that hides behind it. And that can be extended in so many ways.

“The Art of Balance” (M.S.)

This photograph may make it look like the books are touching the wine holder. That is not the case. This wine holder is standing up — quite robustly as we tested — through it’s own volition. And — importantly — because the student who built it understood the principle behind the center of mass. This student’s project started out with him analyzing the “book stacking problem” (which involves how much “overhang” you can create while stacking books at the edge of the table. For example, with one book, you can put it halfway over the table and it will not fall. It turns out that you can actually get infinite overhang… you just need a lot of books. This analysis centered around the center of mass of these books, and actually had this student construct a giant tower of books. The second part of this project involved the creation of this wine holder, which was initially conceived of mathematically using center of mass, then that got complicated so the student started playing around with torque which got more complicated, so the student eventually used intuition and guess and check (based on his general understanding of center of mass). Finally he got it to work. The one thing this student wanted to do for his project was “build/create something” and he did!

“Visualizing Calculus” (T.J.)

This student wanted to make visualizations of some of the things we’ve learned about this year. So he took it upon himself to learn some of the code needed to make Wolfram Demonstrations, and then went forth to do it. He first was fascinated with the idea of fractional derivatives, so he made a visualization of that. Then he wanted to illustrate the idea of the gradient and how the gradient of a 2D surface in 3D space sort of defined a plane tangent to the surface if you zoomed in enough. Finally, he created an applet where the user enters a 2D vector field, and then it calculates the divergence and curl at every point of the vector field. His description for what the divergence was was interesting, and new to me. About the point chosen on the applet, he drew a circle (and the vector field was illustrated in the background). He said “imagine you have a light sprinkling of sand on this whole x-y plane… and then wind started pushing it around — where the wind is represented by the vector field, so the direction and strength of the wind is determined by the vector field. If more sand is coming into the circle and leaving it, then the divergence is negative, if more sand is leaving the circle than coming into it, then the divergence is positive, and if equal amounts of sand are coming in and leaving the circle, then the divergence is zero.”

Our 2014-2015 Issue of Intersections

Another teacher and I started a math-science journal at my school three years ago. We’ve built it up to the point where it is very student-run, and we teachers truly are advisers. Today we had our launch event for the journal, and it is the current issue is now “live.”  I’m so proud of the kids who worked tirelessly to get this year’s issue published.

Click on the image to go to the journal and see the cool math and science things kids at my school are working on!

9th Graders Final Exam Prep / 11th Graders and College Recommendations

This is a two part post, but it’s going to be short. The first part is about final exams for freshman, and how to help them. The second part is about teaching students how to properly approach teachers for college recommendations.

First Final Exams in High School

I’m teaching freshpeople (9th graders) for the first time. And I’ve come to learn how important structure is for them. I’ve realized how useful it is to make topic lists for them (next year, I’m going to ween them off of them and show them how to create their own!). I’ve learned how important it is to be explicit with them about everything. And I’ve learned that many don’t quite know how to study.

In exactly a month, my kids are going to have their geometry final. So I whipped up a guide to explain how they might go about facing this daunting task. It’s not perfect. I hate the fact that it is so long and text heavy. But I want to get it out to my kids soon — so editing will have to wait for next year.

The truth is I don’t know if any of them are going to use it. But I’m going to at least provide them with some ideas — and maybe one or two things will resonate with them. Here it is below (and in .docx form). If you have any additional advice you give to your young ones that would go well in this, please throw them in the comments. Although I might not be able to add them for my kids this year, I can revise it for next year.

11th Graders Asking for College Recommendations

I am teaching a lot of juniors this year, which means I will be asked to write a lot of college recommendations. I never learned how to formally ask for a recommendation until I was in college — but when I was taught by a professor (who was helping guide me in the grad school application process) it was enlightening. I crafted a cover letter, got my best work together, and set up a time to meet with my professors who I was asking for aletting of recommendation from. At that meeting, I outlined why their classes were important to me, what I took away from them, and things I was proud of — and why I would really appreciate if they would be willing to take the time to do this huge thing for me. In other words, I was “pitching” this. It was thought-out, respectful, and professional.

When I first started teaching, kids would ask me for recommendations as a “by the way” in the hallway, or in a short one line email. I don’t allow for that anymore. I make sure they sit down with me and we talk through it. I ask them to fill out an extensive set of questions which often helps me frame the kids in my recommendation (if I don’t yet have a framing device in mind), and lets me learn about kids in a different way.

This year I sent an email out to my juniors, being as explicit as possible. It isn’t to make their lives harder. It is to teach them skills that are usually never explicitly taught. And all of this helps me craft a better recommendation.

Hi all,

I know it’s about the time that y’all are going to be thinking about soliciting college recommendations. If you are thinking of asking me to craft one, you should read this email. If you are certain you are not, you don’t need to read past this!

I know early in the third quarter I talked briefly about this in class, but I figured you should have it in writing too. First off, you should talk with your college counselor before approaching teachers about recommendations. They will be able to help you figure out if you’re asking the right people, who can write about the right qualities, for the colleges you are considering.

If you are going to approach me about being a recommender, there are some things you need to know. I am not a teacher who is grade-focused. I’m a teacher who values reflection, growth, hard-work, and demonstrated passion. If you’re a student who struggled but has shown a transformation in how you see and appreciate mathematics, or in your approach to effectively learning mathematics, or in how you communicate mathematics, or in your ability to work effectively and kindly in a group, or something else—all that is important to me. On the other hand, if you have done well on assessments, that is all well-and-good… but it is important that you are more than that… it is important to me that you have shown a passion to go above and beyond (inside and outside of the classroom and curriculum), or an enthusiasm for the material, or a willingness/eagerness to help others. In other words, it is important that you have thought about yourself, and can talk to me about how you are more than just grades.

That all being said, just a few reminders of what I said in class about recommendations:

· I do not write recommendations in the fall, so if you’re going to ask for one, you must ask me this year. Fall is a very busy time and is too far away; I like to have students fresh in my mind when I write. You also cannot approach me after our last day of classes (May 22).
· I never learned how to properly ask for recommendations until I was in college. So I want to help you learn that skill. (I’ve had to ask for recommendations in high school, college, grad school, and as a teacher.) If you’re going to ask me, send me an email to set up a meeting to talk formally about it. You need to plan this meeting, because you’re going to be in charge of leading it. Think about what you’re going to ask and how you’re going to pitch it.
· I said in class that you should start keeping a list in the back of your notebook of specific moments that you’re particularly proud of (large and small!), and things that you’ve done that might set you apart or make you unique or interesting! You should be sure to bring that to our meeting. If you have specific things you’ve done throughout the year that you are proud of (large or small!), you should bring those too.

As you might suspect, I write recommendations with great integrity—meaning I am honest and specific in what I write.

In the past I’ve been asked for a lot of recommendations from juniors. This year I may have to put a cap on how many I’m writing for, unfortunately, as each recommendation takes a number of hours from start to finish. After we meet, if I agree to write for you, you will be asked to fill out an extensive reflective questionnaire. I recognize that I ask a lot of students who request a recommendation, but I also know how important these recommendations are – and to do justice in the recommendation, these are important to me.

Always,
Mr. Shah

Do Kids Really Understand Trigonometry once Sine/Cosine/Tangent are Introduced?

This year I’ve been doing a lot of work with my geometry kids to get them to build up a deeply conceptual understanding of trigonometry. Right now we’re still in the part of the unit where the the terms sine/cosine/tangent haven’t been introduced, and kids are building up their understanding by thinking of ratios in specific triangles. But soon we are going to introduce the terms, and I’m afraid they are going to go to their calculator and use it blindly, and forget precisely what sine, cosine, and tangent really mean.

For my kids, at this level, I want each term to be a ratio generates a class of similar triangles — which all look the same, but have different sizes. And I want kids to conjure that up, when they think of $\sin(40^o)=0.6428$. But I fear that 0.6428 will stop losing meaning as a ratio of sides… that 0.6428 won’t mean anything geometric or visual to them. Why? Because the words “sine” “cosine” and “tangent” start acting as masks, and kids start thinking procedurally when using them in geometry.

So here’s the setup for what we’re going to do.

Kids are going to be placed in pairs. They are going to be given the following scorecard:

They will also be given the following sheet, with a clever title (the Platonic part refers to something we’ve talked about before… don’t worry ’bout it) (.docx form). This sheet has a bunch of right triangles, with 10, 20, 30, … , 80 degree angles.

Then with their first partner, on the front board, I project:

The kids will have 3 minutes to discuss how they’re going to figure out which two triangles/angles best “fit” these trig equations. (I’m hoping they are going to say, eventually, something like “well the hypotenuse should be about twice the length of the opposite leg, so that looks a lot like triangle C in our placemat” for the first equation.)

They write down their answers. If they finish early, I have additional review questions from the beginning of the year that will be worth some number of points — to work on individually.

When time is up, they move to a new chair (in a particular way) so that everyone has a new partner. I throw some other equations up. And have them discuss and respond. Then they move again, and have new equations up.

I’ve scaffolded the equations I’m putting up in a particular way — so I’m hoping they lead to some good discussions. And I’m hoping as soon as a few people catch onto the whole “let’s compare side lengths” approach, the switching will allow for more discussion — so soon everyone will have caught on.

At the end of the game, we’ll have some discussion, and through those discussions we’ll reveal the answers. And of course, the student with the most correct answers will win some sort of fabulous prize.

The questions I’m going to ask are here:

The discussion questions are here:

Fin.

I’m super excited to try this out on my kids next week sometime.

Stuffing Sacks

Matt Enlow (math teacher in MA) posted a fascinating problem online today, one he thinks of when storing all those plastic bags from the grocery store. You shove them so they all lie in a single bag, and throw that bag under the sink. Here’s the question: how many different ways can you store these bags?

For 1 bag, there is only 1 way.
For 2 bags, there is still only 1 way.
For 3 bags, there are 2 ways.

Here is a picture for clarification:

Can you figure out how many ways for 6 bags? 13 bags?

You are now officially nerdsniped.

A number of people had trouble calculating 4 bags correctly, so I’ll post the number of ways 4 bags could be stored after the jump at the bottom, so you can at least see if you’re starting off correctly…

Additional Information: Matt and I figured the solution to this problem together on twitter. It was an interesting thing. We didn’t really “collaborate,” but we both refined some of our initial data (for 5 bags, he undercounted, and I overcounted). It seemed we were both thinking of similar things — one idea in particular which I’m not going to mention, which was the key for our solution. What blew my mind was that at the exact time Matt was tweeting me his approach that he thought led to the solution, I looked at my paper and I had the exact same thing (written down in a slightly different way). I sent him a picture of my paper and he sent me a picture of his paper, and I literally laughed out loud. We both calculated how many arrangements for 6 bags, and got the same answer. Huzzah! I will say I am fairly confident in our solution, based on some additional internet research I did after.

Obviously I’m being purposefully vague so I don’t give anything away. But have fun being nerdsniped!

Update late in the evening: It might just be Matt and my solution is wrong. In fact, I’m now more and more convinced it is. Our method works for 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6 bags, but may break down at 7. It’s like this problem — deceptive! I’m fairly convinced our solution is not right, based on more things I’ve seen on the internet. But it is kinda exciting and depressing at the same time. Is there an error? Can we fix the error, if there is? WHAT WILL HAPPEN?!

The number of ways 4 bags can be stored is… (after the jump)

A Semi-Circle Conjecture

At the very start of the school year in geometry, we started by having students make observations and write down conjectures based on their observations. We had a very fruitful paper folding activity, which students — through perseverance and a lot of conversation with each other — eventually were able to explain.

However we also gave out the following:

And students made the conjecture that you will always get a right angle, no matter where you put the point. But when they tried explaining it with what they knew (remember this was on the first or second day of class), they quickly found out they had some trouble. So we had to leave our conjecture as just that… a conjecture.

However I realized that by now, students can deductively prove that conjecture in two different ways: algebraically and geometrically.

Background:

My kids have proved* that if you have two lines with opposite reciprocal slopes, the lines must be perpendicular (conjecture, proof assignment).
My kids have derived the equation for a circle from first principles.
My kids have proved the theorem that the inscribed angle in a circle has half the measure of the central angle (if both subtend the same arc) [see Problem #10]

Two Proofs of the Conjecture

Now to be completely honest, this isn’t exactly how I’d normally go about this. If I had my way, I’d give kids a giant whiteboard and tell ’em to prove the conjecture we made at the start of the year. The two problems with this are: (1) I doubt my kids would go to the algebraic proof (they avoid algebraic proofs!), and part of what I really want my kids to see is that we can get at this proof in multiple ways, and (2) I only have about 20-25 minutes to spare. We have so much we need to do!

With that in mind, I crafted the worksheet above. It’s going to be done in three parts.

Warm Up on Day 1: Students will spend 5 minutes refreshing their memory of the equation of a circle and how to derive it (page 1).

Warm Up on Day 2: Students will work in their groups for 8-10 minutes doing the geometric proof (page 2).

Warm Up on Day 3: Students will spend 5-8 minutes working on the algebraic proof (page 3). Once they get the slopes, we together will go through the algebra of showing the slopes as opposite reciprocals of each other as a class. It will be very guided instruction.

Possible follow-up assignment: Could we generalize the algebraic proof to a circle centered at the origin with any radius? What about radius 3? What about radius R? Work out the algebra confirming the our proof still holds.

Special Note:

Once we prove the Pythagorean theorem (right now we’re letting kids use it because they’ve learned it before… but we wanted to hold off on proving it) and the converse, we can use the converse to have a third proof that we have a right angle. We can show (algebraically) that the square of one side length (the diameter of the semi-circle) has the same value as the sum of the squares of the other two sides lengths of the triangle. Thus, we must have a right angle opposite the diameter!

I’m sure there are a zillion other ways to prove it. I’m just excited to have my kids see that something that was so simply observed but was impossible to explain at the start of the year can yield its mysteries based on what they know now.

The two semi-circle conjecture documents in .docx form: 2014-09-15 A Conjecture about Semicircles 2015-03-30 A Conjecture about Semicircles, Part II

*Well, okay, maybe not proved, since they worked it out for only one specific case… But this was at the start of the year, and their argument was generalizable.