Letting Go

By Mica Angela Hendricks and daughter

My dear friend, Rachel Wynne, kindly emailed me the link I am about to share. It’s a blog post called “Collaborating with a Four-Year Old”. I just love it. It’s about a mom and her young daughter creating artwork together. The pictures are priceless, and the ideas about sharing and collaboration are profound.

“Those things you hold so dear cannot change and grow and expand unless you loosen your grip on them a little.” - Mica Angela Hendricks, The Busy Mockingbird

Stanford University: How to Learn Math

Image from Geometry Daily.

I can’t say enough about how fantastic Jo Boaler’s online math class was. I finished it yesterday.

Jo is a Stanford University professor, and she created a free, online class for teachers and parents called How to Learn Math. Students (there were approximately 35,000 people registered) watched videos, wrote responses to prompts, and completed other tasks at their own pace. Some are still finishing; the course ends September 28.

Jo is working on a course for young people now. She has published a book called What’s Math Got To Do With It. I’m convinced that whatever Jo does in the future, it will be great. Keep an eye on her.

In a nutshell, Jo is all about dispelling myths about who is good at math and who isn’t, evangelizing about the growth mindset work of Carol Dweck, and giving teachers ideas about effective math education. She advocates for math as an inquiry activity, and really seeing it in a totally different way than most of us were taught in school and continue to teach today.

In Jo’s words:

Mathematics classrooms should be places where students believe:

• Everyone can do well in math.
• Mathematics problems can be solved with many different insights and methods.
• Mistakes are valuable, they encourage brain growth and learning.
• Mathematics will help them in their lives, not because they will see the same types of problems in the real world but because they are learning to think quantitatively and abstractly and developing an inquiry relationship with math.

Machines to Materials

I just watched two PBS NOVA shows that I must share. One is called Making Stuff: Smaller. The other is Making Stuff: Stronger. There are other Making Stuff shows I haven’t watched yet.

Check these out! You can watch them for free online (at least right now you can).

As an educator and a parent, these videos get me all fired up. Young people should be learning about cutting edge science and math, not just the stuff of textbooks and standards. I want to show these to students and then I’d expect to hear them talking about wanting to be a chemist, material scientist, or nanotechnologist when they grow up.

My favorite part of Making Stuff: Smaller was the concept of starting by using a machine to complete a task, and then evolving to using a material to accomplish the same task. This is a key feature of miniaturization, which is what allows us to have laptops and cellphones, among other things, today. Computer processing went from giant rooms of vacuum tubes to silicon chips, but the story I liked the most was the journey from behemoth pendulum clocks to quartz watches. If this makes no sense to you, watch the video.

Another awesome story in Making Stuff: Smaller is about driving a tiny robot around inside someone’s eyeball to deliver medicine. Holy cow!

Making Mistakes

Here's a TED Radio Hour show featured on NPR entitled "Making Mistakes". Excellent, and very relevant to mathematics education and life in general.

Shrub

Edible Wasatch 2013, photo by David Vogel

My brother, David Vogel, and his partner, Rachel Hodson, are the owners and editors of a magazine called Edible Wasatch. It’s about local food in Utah, but I can’t wait for it to arrive in my mailbox in Vermont each season. It’s always full of gorgeous photos, great articles, and interesting recipes.

Shrub is the name of a syrup made from fruit, sugar and vinegar. I found it in the summer 2013 issue of Edible Wasatch I just received. You can add a small amount of shrub to seltzer water to make tasty, homemade soda kids will love.

Teachers and parents: Try making shrub with your kids. With this activity, you can combine wellness, local food appreciation, culinary skills, and math. What could be better? Then reward yourself by using some of the kids’ leftover shrub to mix up a delicious summer cocktail.

Strawberries have been so perfect around here lately, I think I would make shrub with those. However, you can use any fresh, ripe berries or other fruits. I have raspberries growing at my house now, so I might combine those with some local strawberries.

Here’s the recipe, straight from Edible Wasatch:

Basic Shrub

One part fruit or berries

One part sugar

One part vinegar

Wash and cut up the fruit and put into a bowl or a jar large enough to contain all of your ingredients. Add the sugar and stir or mash it with the fruit until it’s evenly distributed. Cover with cheese cloth or a kitchen towel to protect it from fruit flies and leave it to macerate - at room temperature for a few hours or overnight - until the fruit has broken down and become juicy.

Add the vinegar to the fruit and sugar mixture - apple cider vinegar or any kind of wine vinegar, not distilled vinegar. Stir or shake until the sugar is completely dissolved. Strain off the liquid and discard the solids. Store your shrub in a bottle in the refrigerator and enjoy for up to a year.

See their original article and recipe here.

Ideas for teachers and parents

Let kids do all the work, including deciding which fruits or berries are in season and would work well, picking or buying those, making the shrub, and making the soda. They could even sell it in the neighborhood instead of lemonade and hand out the recipe to customers.

Here’s some math. Ask kids things like...

• What does “part” mean in this recipe?
• How do we know how much of an ingredient to use when “one part” is called for?
• How is this measurement different than other kinds of measurements we’ve seen in recipes (teaspoons, cups, etc.)?
• How should we decide how much shrub to make?
• How much fruit, sugar, and vinegar would we need if we wanted to double the amount next time we make it?
• What would we do if we wanted to try making shrub that was less sweet?
• Have you ever seen another recipe that called for “parts”? How could you figure out how much you need for “parts” when you know the total amount of the recipe you desire?

Other possible questions

• If we use a few teaspoons of shrub to make homemade soda, about how much sugar will one glass of soda contain?
• How does our homemade soda compare to a commercial soda? Amount of sugar? Type of sugar? Other ingredients? Taste? Color? Cost? Environmental and economic impact?
• What does “macerate” mean?
• What other ways could we use shrub besides making soda?
• Why can shrub stay in the fridge for so long without spoiling?
• What questions do you have?

Sand Castle Summer

Look what I just found on Math Munch: Cool, geometric sand castles made by Calvin Seibert. What will you create on the beach this summer?

What Google has learned about hiring

A few days ago, the New York Times published an interview by Adam Bryant entitled “In Head-Hunting, Big Data May Not Be Such a Big Deal”. Bryant interviewed Lazslo Bock, a Google executive, about what Google has learned about what works and what doesn’t when it comes to hiring new employees.

Google has the resources to crunch numbers on employee performance or success and match that to hiring criteria. Most of the rest of us don’t, so this is worth reading. Here are a few things that stood out for me, as someone who participates on hiring committees and tends to wonder how good I am at judging applicants.

“Years ago, we did a study to determine whether anyone at Google is particularly good at hiring. We looked at tens of thousands of interviews, and everyone who had done the interviews and what they scored the candidate, and how that person ultimately performed in their job. We found zero relationship.”

“On the hiring side, we found that brainteasers are a complete waste of time...What works well are structured behavioral interviews, where you have a consistent rubric for how you assess people, rather than having each interviewer just make stuff up...[also] where you’re not giving someone a hypothetical, but you’re starting with a question like, “Give me an example of a time when you solved an analytically difficult problem.”

“Twice a year, anybody who has a manager is surveyed on the manager’s qualities...We then share that with the manager, and we track improvement across the whole company. Over the last three years, we’ve significantly improved the quality of people management at Google, measured by how happy people are with their managers...for most [managers], just knowing that information causes them to change their conduct.”

Lastly, this is my favorite bit from the article:

“...G.P.A.’s are worthless as a criteria for hiring, and test scores are worthless...We found that they don’t predict anything...the proportion of people without any college education at Google has increased over time...academic environments are artificial environments. People who succeed there are...conditioned to succeed in that environment. One of my own frustrations when I was in college and grad school is that you knew the professor was looking for a specific answer...You want people who like figuring out stuff where there is no obvious answer.”

These insights have far-reaching implications for teachers, not just members of hiring committees.

Assessment Items

There is a new Smarter Balanced Practice Test released. You can choose a grade level (3, 4, 5, etc.) and choose math and see an early version of the Common Core math assessments that will replace the NECAP.

I can get the practice test to work on some computers, but not on my personal laptop because it won’t let me drag and drop. I have no idea why. And if you can’t drag and drop, you can’t answer test questions or advance to the next question. Try it yourself and hopefully it will work. I submitted a report to SBAC but they said they can’t reproduce that problem so they really didn’t have any advice for me.

These practice tests are worth a look. Pass them along to students to try this summer, and/or do the problems with your classes in the fall. Answers and scoring guide is due to become available in July.

This fall, students will take their last NECAP tests. Here are all the NECAP released items, which serve as great practice over the summer or in the fall before the assessment window.