I’ve been doing a little modeling on the side the last few weeks. No photo shoots for Esquire or GQ, but modeling -- as in creating ways to represent the world by using math or graphics to gain understanding and find solutions to problems. I enrolled in my second MOOC (Massive Online Open Course) through Coursera a couple of weeks ago and have gone through the first three weeks of Dr. Scott E. Page’s “Model Thinking” class at the University of Michigan. It already has me thinking that modeling, along with probability and statistics, should be required at all schools.
If you have been listening to the news lately, you are probably aware of the growing demonstrations in Sao Paulo, where Brazilians are protesting against high taxes and low living standards. Dr. Page’s lecture that I watched yesterday demonstated a simple model that explains how difficult it is to predict these huge public demonstrations that have occurred around the world the last three years. It all has to do with thresholds and peer effects. I’ll let him explain it in this six-minute video:
This simple model has some pretty big implications for seventh-graders. We know that as children grow to be teens that most look to peers for cues on what they should wear, how they should act, what music to listen to, the type of social media to use, etc. What is a particular thirteen-year-old's threshold for "trying on a new hat" and what if that new hat is not something harmless, but something that can have lasting ramifications. I plan to show this video to my advisory next year in hopes that understanding thresholds and the peer effect may give my boys enough knowledge to display courage and confidence in situations that could be harmful or dangerous.
No comments:
Post a Comment