I watch almost no TV. We cut the cable last year and haven’t looked back. However, I occasionally watch a show on Netflix. This weekend, I greatly enjoyed A Scandal in Belgravia from the BBC Sherlock series, and I noticed that Sherlock Holmes and I have something in common. (It is not arriving in Buckingham Palace covered only by a bed sheet). In the series, Sherlock sometimes drifts off into thought and loses all track of time and place. He may “come to” several hours later and claim that he was just talking to someone a minute ago. Sometimes when I run, the same thing happens. After five minutes of running, my mind becomes so engrossed in some topic that when I get back to the house I have little or no recollection of the physical world I just ran through. I think it is because my brain starts working on something with such incredible focus and attention that I am totally oblivious to the world around me.
I have been paying closer attention to attention after starting Chade-Meng Tan’s book, Search Inside Yourself. Chade-Meng Tan started his employment at Google as an engineer, but has shifted his focus to helping his colleagues and others gain emotional intelligence through mindfulness. His current job title with Google is “Jolly Good Fellow.” Tan writes a lot about attention in the book and how we can all grow our ability to attend. One type of attention that he describes is where focus is intense on one thing, like a spotlight shining on one object. I believe that this is the type of focus that Sherlock and I experience when lost in thought. The other type of attention that he describes is one where the focus is everywhere, a light shining from one place to another, taking in everything. Perhaps an example of this type of focus is when Sherlock Holmes observes a crime scene. Tan believes that by practicing, anyone can refine and improve the ability to attend in both ways. I’m interested to find out as I attempt to practice his techniques. After all, the more I can control my attention, the more I will learn.
I spend ten or fifteen minutes nearly every day looking through my Twitter feed for interesting ideas. As I wade through Diane Ravitch’s daily diatribe or scan Eric Sheninger’s hourly updates (honestly, when does the man work?), I sometimes come across an idea that is immediately accessible, implementable, and worthwhile. This was the case with a video that explains how to use podcasts for feedback in writing that I was referred to by a tweet.
After I sent the link out to my colleagues, I started thinking about how I could use it to give meaningful feedback. I thought about all the times in my day when I'd like to offer positive feedback, but to give it on the spot would be impractical or impossible. I regularly observe situations like students listening intently to a partner’s idea on why they should use bigger wheels on an NXT robot, inviting a classmate to join a lunch table, or putting an arm around a buddy after the last shot did not go down. Even if I could offer positive verbal feedback at these times, the feedback itself might detract from the action. But, what if I could give a fifteen to thirty second affirmation of these acts at a later time? Something like:
It takes almost no time for me to take out my phone, make a quick recording, and then email it. Of course, this type of audio feedback won't replace the hand-written notes, emails, or verbal affirmations that I give daily, but it does offer me another tool that I plan to implement.
I would bet that my middle school (junior high) math classes were quite similar to the way you were taught math. I watched the teacher work problems on the board and then I was given problems to practice. I frequently rushed through my homework in an attempt to get it done as fast as possible so I could head to the tennis courts or shoot baskets in the driveway. After a couple of weeks, I was given a “unit test” which was supposed to assess whether or not I had learned the material. Having some natural ability in math, I usually scored well on the tests.
However, school is not where I really learned math. I learned math on my summer car vacations adding up miles on creased, fold-up maps; and by figuring the amount of gasoline our lumbering Buick Estate Wagon gobbled up on trips to the Texas coast. I got pretty good at predicting arrival times based on our average speed and distance left to travel. I learned to compute with fractions by helping my dad and older brother refurbish a hulking wooden sailboat and build a two-story fort that protected our back yard from neighborhood rapscallions. I learned probability by playing cards and dice games, which eventually led to me reading Scarnes New Complete Guide to Gambling when I was twelve-years-old. It is a pretty heavy read for a seventh grader, but I made some pocket money in my teens because I knew the odds in blackjack.
So, where are our kids really learning math today? At Carolina Day School, they are learning math in school. Surprise. They are learning math because they are using math.
In eighth-grade, students play with motion by building and zooming balloon-jet cars across the floor. They plot rates of change on graphs and understand that slope is more than just a line on a page in a book. In seventh grade, students measure and cut popsicle sticks to form specific geometric shapes. They create these from scale drawings, and, in addition to getting practice with angles, they learn that precision is sometimes critical. Our sixth graders design and run their own experiments and determine what types of graphs and charts best display the generated data. Analysis and use of data is crucial to our students’ understanding the world around them.
Learning has little use unless you can do something with the knowledge. Doing something implies action, and CDS students do much more than sit in class absorbing facts and algorithms. They build, observe, compute, design, record, analyze, and judge -- and in doing these things, they actually learn math.
