I know a lot of people have a lot of things to say about Dan Meyer.

What I can say is that he was the first teacher blogger — though now my blogroll is much longer — who kept me inspired and chugging along in my first year of teaching. (Wow, I’m already writing like the year is over… and we have one more month to go!)

Which is why I can’t but be thrilled for him becoming a winner in the Cable’s Leaders in Learning.

Kudos Dan Meyer! (Hat tip to Dangerously Irrelevant for spreading the word.)

First things first:

Now… for the actual physical explanation, you can read it here. And for the historical precedent, you can read about it here. (via Kottke)

UPDATE: An applet here.

Recently the other 7th grade teacher told me she wanted to do a day of origami math. We had been learning the relationship between the sides of special right triangles (30-60-90 and 45-45-90). We had also started talking about the volumes of prisms.

With that in mind, my co-teacher showed me a project she was going to do. She was going to have her students build an origami cube, and then use their knowledge of these special right triangles to determine the volume of the cube.

We said that the side of the original unfolded sheet of origami paper was “x” and then using that, they needed to find the volume of the cube in terms of “x.”

Although I’m never quite convinced that these sort of hands-on activities really bring about understanding (see recent NYT article questioning the relationship between the concrete v. abstract in math), we had a day to spare and so I decided to do it in my class too.

I made a website with the step-by-step instructions to project on the SmartBoard so my students could follow along. I also had a giant square which I folded in front of them. I had each student do only one step at a time.

Since the day, I found a number of videos on YouTube explaining how to make the origami shapes. Here’s one:

Overall the students seemed to have an okay time with it. They really liked the cube itself. When it came to solving the problem, I let them float on their own. (This is an advanced class, so I wanted to see where they would go.) Many got to the point where they unfolded their origami sheet and saw the creases which formed the side of the square. And it was this point — where they had to notice a relationship between the side of the original origami sheet (“x”) and the diagonal of the square (“x/2”) that was key to the solution. With a little prompting, they got there.

We still needed an extra 5 or 10 minutes for this lesson to go more smoothly and to give students time to mull and go astray. Two of the four groups working on it got the answer, or very close to it. I stopped the investigation 7 minutes before class ended and we went through the solution as a group.

I got an emergency email from a good friend from college (now in grad school at MIT) who is going to soon be meeting with a professor to talk about Number Theory (honestly, I have no idea why she needs to meet him; she does material science!).

She needs a crash course in it, and wanted a recommendation for a textbook. Of course, I go digging around online to find out what book I used, to no avail. I distinctly remember the cover, but I can’t find that on Amazon either. So I finally go to my last resort… digging through my 30 or so binders (from high school (!) and college) looking for the syllabus from that class.

I find the binder, but the syllabus doesn’t have the name of the textbook on it, even though it has 3 pages of assigned problems from the textbook.

My friend is, sadly, out of luck.

But here’s the horrible, horrifying part. Once I started looking through the old binder, I felt dumb. Like really, really dumb. For a number of reasons which I will enumerate here:

1. My three test scores (I don’t know what I got on the final) were 28/40, 29.5/40, and 32/40. [1]

2. One of the tests has a depressing, terse note from the professor “1 [point] for effort”

3. My class notes are completely beautiful but, for me today, totally incomprehensible. I mean, I don’t even remember most of the basic terms that I’m writing about.

Hensel’s Lemma: Let . , and . Then there exists a unique such that .

Did I ever understand that? Yeah, I know. If I had a month and the textbook, I would be able to figure out what that meant again. Which is (very) slightly heartening. But how sad it is that all my hard work in college is so fleeting? I wish it weren’t all so temporary.

PS. The subject line is from this poem.

[1] Okay, here I’m being a bit disingenuous. I remember that for at least one of them I scored the highest grade in the class. There were only 10-15 students in the class, and the teacher used to write up on the chalkboard the highest score, the lowest score, the mean, the median, the mode, and the standard deviation. Yikes. Those were scary moments, after the professor wrote that on the board, but before he returned the exams. But somehow, after teaching high school, scores in this form look bad. Even though they were probably fine. (I ended up with an A in the class.)

The beautiful New York weather and three day weekend inspired to go out on this Saturday night. So I shaved, dollied myself up, donned my newly purchased tote bag, and left the apartment.

I felt pretty good about everything as I was having dinner with a friend, followed by a postprandial drink at a local coffeeshop. When I left, the barista on his cigarette break asked me if I was a designer. I, feeling good about how I put together my outfit, glowed, even though I played it cool. [1]

We made our way down three blocks to go to a concert at a local bar. The next person to speak to me was the bouncer, who looked me up and down. His first pronouncement arrived in question form: “Did you just get out of bed?”

[1] When I was in Paris, my friend Tom and I had our pictures taken by an aspiring fashion student for her work on “street fashion.” I felt good then too.

The NYT has recently run two articles (one, two) on the fear that exists (among some) that the Large Hadron Collider — when started — will destroy the earth through the creation of a black hole. Interestingly, this was exactly the topic my undergraduate thesis (in STS) was on, except instead of being about the LHC, it was about the particle accelerator being built at Brookhaven National Laboratories.

But when you delve into the history of it it, it isn’t all that surprising. The guy who is making the black-hole-possibility claim about the LHC is exactly the same guy who made the black-hole-possibility claim at Brookhaven: Walter Wagner. The newspaper stories take the same tenor now that they did back then too.

Although my thesis isn’t awesome (I’ve read some of my friends’ undergraduate theses and I know mine doesn’t stack up) nor well written, I can say it’s timely, so I’m uploading this PDF version of it. I was just trying to find a choice paragraph to lob off and stick up here, but I figured: hey, why not? Unfortunately, in this particular electronic version, some of the websites cited in the footnotes have disappeared (“ERROR!”), and this is the only electronic copy I have. (One of many consequences of the many Great Computer Crashes which have befallen me.)

As an added enticement for those on the fence, I spend a whole “chapter” talking about the fear that the atmosphere would ignite when the atomic bomb was set off for the first time.

I like my school a whole lot. There’s a ton going for it, from the funny, caring and inviting faculty to the really committed students. My department head has my back, and always has answers to even the glaringly neophyte questions I bring to him. The math faculty make working day in and day out a pleasure. And even though I’ve had my share of griping and complaining (a cathartic activity that is endemic to being a teacher) I couldn’t imagine a better place to have inaugurated my teaching career.

All of that came rushing through my head as I read this article in New York Magazine about a well-known private school in New York in a state of major turmoil.  It’s a fascinating read, about school values, a board of trustees with a strong voice, and teachers and students in battle. An excerpt below:

 The Web page for a Horace Mann Facebook group titled the “Men’s Issues Club” mocked a student organization on campus called the Women’s Issues Club. The 44 members of the parody club included children of both trustees and the legion of prominent names who send their children to Horace Mann, which sits in the top rung of private schools in New York. One club member referred to an English teacher as a “crazy ass bitch” and a French teacher as an “acid casualty.” Another boy boasted that he’s “the only person here who actually beats women when hes [sic] drunk. no joke,” while still another bragged that he had “banged” a teacher “in [the] music dept. bathroom” and “will get great college rec” for the accomplishment. The boys lamented Star Jones’s “fat and wrinkled ass,” “sex in the city,” and “feminism,” proclaiming, “WHERE DO THEY BELONG?!?!????!!! IN THE KITCHEN!! IN THE KITCHEN!!!” The club summed up its mission thus: “For too long men have not had a way to express themselves and their beliefs in society. Men need to have a voice, we aren’t meant to be seen and not heard. Let freedom ring, bitches.”