A small math/design experiment I set up this weekend. Please take 30 seconds to cut a line.

Statistics will be posted as soon as they become significant.

Immediately after class, as the lunch line swells.

Student: Can you show me that cross-product/torque thing again?

Cornally: Sure, what about it?

Student: I just don’t get the math.

Cornally: Do you want me to do another example?

Student: Sure

Cornally creates two random 3-vectors and begins to find their cross product with the determinant of a 3×3 matrix. Student sits on a table and watches. Student listens to Cornally narrate, and corrects Cornally’s inability to keep track of negative signs.

Cornally: There are a few procedural things here, but what we’re trying to do is find a vector that’s ninety degrees to both of the first two, which is why the x-component only does math with the y- and z-components (drones on)

Student doesn’t take notes, just like he did during class. Cornally starts to become annoyed that he’s losing lunch time and Student isn’t even writing this down.

Cornally: …and so this result is ninety to both, and has a magnitude related to how perpendicular they were.

Student takes a picture of work with his high-res camera phone and texts it to the other students in his group. Student then leaves the room.

This kind of remediation is really common. I will often run little clinics during odd liminal times of the day. The students who get left off the Socratic train during class often just need a small piece of direct instruction that they can back-fill under the conceptualization.

I didn’t see the phone coming. I can only imagine how that student’s brain may have engaged differently if he had to copy everything I was writing while listening to me while hoping to go to lunch quickly.

Tomorrow morning I’m going to get to do one of the things that makes teaching redeemable from its 37th-circle-of-hell-infinite-time-sink nature, I get to design an independent study course with an individual precocious and motivated student.

Designing such courses are more indulgent for me than the students realize. It’s a way of getting someone else to delve into source materials that I think are face melting while they feed me new analyses I never could have come up with myself. It’s like reverse-parasitism with some symbiosis, and a lot of me responding to questions with questions (but not in a douchey way).

The student I’ll be working with is nominally on the derp-de-derp medical school track (which is a topic we can discuss at length later), so Biology is the name of the game. However, this student is a well established cook and baker, so I think things will head that direction. I’m thinking kind of a Pollan meets Gastronomy meets Supersize Me experience here.

I’m just kind of having an idea monsoon here, so be prepared for a classic ThThTh bulleted list of fury:

• Source: Omnivore’s Dilemma (Pollan).
• Cake flour protein content investigations (baking break, kneading experiments, gluten content, etc…)
• Source: Four Fish (Greenberg). Inquiries: Nutritional Content of wild vs farmed fish/meat.
• Protein source studies into proliferation of vegetarian/vegan lifestyles.
• Source: Botany of Desire (Pollan). Probably use parts of the PBS documentary.
• Population genetics simulations in monocultures (i.e. Monsanto’s questionable business practices) – Heavy programming.
• Roasting, Suate, Sweating, and Searing: quantitative studies of the Maillard reactions.

In general, I want my student to produce a blog (they blog heavily already) that is readable and full of investigatory information that probably hasn’t been published in the context before. In short, I want my student to be able to produce something from this study that lingers instead of just rots on a hard drive, because, like church, school shouldn’t be about the building.

I’m interested in getting a hold of a mass spectrometer we could use for identifying molecules created during cooking and baking. Anyone have any good ideas? I’ve been searching hackaday for a while now…

If you have anything to add that’s even secantily related (i’ll take tangentially, too) please drop it in the comments!

(I’m back from the semester of hell, btw, let the competitions begin)

I’m getting ready to give a talk about grades. You never really know where people are at on the continuum that is assessment reform, and it makes me think back about my whirlwind tour of the assessment world during my first four years of teaching.

So, if you will, the first five steps of assessment grieving:

1. Oh Sh!t, My Quizzes Don’t Mean Anything.

We all have this moment. The formative work we do to help kids “get ready for the test” doesn’t do that at all. Wrestling with this realization is the first step towards changing the culture of your classroom away from adversarial grading to formative assessment and feedback-based assessment.

In what may be the only slide I’ve ever made that matters, which is frustrating because it breaks every rule of presentation design. Sorry:

Click to embiggen.

These five questions should be enough to start any teacher, administrator, or educator down the road to assessment reform. It made me hold my face in my hands, itelluwhat.

2. Retention vs. Cramming

We then get down to the nitty-grtitty. Instead of just making it through the material by quizzing and testing it once (ding, done! wrong.) Reassessment starts to creep up on your mind. You fight it. You feel like there’s a demon called “retake” that you’re beginning to bring burnt offerings in secret after school. I knew that this had to happen, but how could I do it without having students stay addicted to the points?

Czernobog, the Slavic god of retakes for points. Pure Evil

3. Reassessment Runs Rampant

So I started letting assessment happen whenever. This felt like the wild west. Seriously. I felt like it was the Gunslinger walking with Clint just hoping that the law will get laid down. Kids showed up at all levels of development. Some had studied and the system recorded their learning. Some were just hoping to get an easier problem and walk away with the points to get their parents of their backs. I had to corral this.

It felt like the experiment was failing, but, as the ineffable Matt Townsley would say, if you’re thinking about assessment and learning at a meta level, you’re doing a better job already.

4. Pointslessness

So, things get wacky. I got to give a TEDx talk right in the middle of my genesis of these ideas. I had to come up with something that would be coherent in 17 minutes. I came up with BlueHarvest.

Let’s get rid of the points and just keep track of what the students do. BlueHarvest is not about me making money, it’s about providing all of us a way to keep track of feedback so that we don’t have to pretend that points and grades are doing that for us. They don’t, and we all know it.

I’m now at the tail end of this experiment.

5. The Efficiency Game

Now that I’ve spent an entire semester teaching high schoolers, undergraduates, and graduate students without using and numbers at all, I feel like I owe all of you some sort of Results & Discussion.

First of all, it takes a long time to give this much feedback, especially if it’s the only data you’re keeping to justify the inevitable final grade (barf). I’m still pissed about this, but I can’t just start my own hippy commune, not yet anyway (I had a student ask me if he could go to my BlueHarvest school a few days ago, that was heartening)

I’ve seen the forest for the trees. Psychologically, students only care about feedback. We want to pretend that they won’t do anything unless it’s for points, but I’ve lived it. I’ve taught well over 100 students without using a single number, and it looks a lot like people who just care about getting it.

However, efficiency must be considered. Are numbers truly evil, or is it just the way we use them? I’m going to roll out a hybrid system next semester. The students are going to be responsible for putting evidence into BlueHarvest, and I’m going to use numbers and words to communicate to that student my assessment of that work. Parents still love to be able to look at a letter grade, and I know they’re busy, so I owe them a quick-look.

BlueHarvest still emails the parents whenever a piece of feedback or evidence is uploaded. The parents love it, and they feel like they’re a part of how that kid is learning, not just forcing them to learn once things go wrong.

Can you tell I just had some parent-teacher conferences fly by?

I miss you all.

I heard an interesting story from one of my college students last night. He had visited a mathematics classroom and witnessed pretty much the most standard classroom that there is:

The teacher collected homework, went over it, taught a new lesson via lecture, then gave new homework that students could work on in class for a few minutes (Yipee! What a benevolent treat!)

We can talk all day about why you may or may not agree with this. Students won’t self start, they won’t be able to apply content in a unique situation, and finally they won’t really care. Any grade or learning that results from this is more a measure of being able to endure boredom and monotony rather than actually learning math.

This is the kind of classroom where any break from the tedium is heralded as fantastic teaching. I once had a teacher come sliding into the room on his belly riding atop his overhead cart. This was talked about for days. As a teacher, a decade later, it blows my mind that this is all I remember from Pre-Calc. What an effing joke, but wait, it gets better.

Hajj of the Potty Passes:

I've always wondered, should there be apostrophes?

My student observed a weekly ritual. The reclaiming of the potty passes. Students are given two potty passes a week, and, you guessed it, that’s how many times they can go to the bathroom during the week. Here’s the mind numbing part (<= not hyperbole), the students can turn unused passes in for extra credit at the end of the week. This is happening right now. In real schools.

Let’s not throw this teacher under the bus quite yet. Why are potty passes inflating grades? Obviously there’s a hallway issue in this school. Obviously students want to leave their classes. The potty pass is the sticker-chart solution to these issues.

What’s a better, more learning-centered solution? Two things: Lesson design and grading.

The lessons I’ve given that have gotten serious, total buy-in have the following in common:

1. Narrative. This is Dan Meyer’s thing. The students are aware of why we’re doing what we’re doing, and finding the answer, knowledge, or meeting the objective is motivated clearly. That motivation can have nothing to do with pleasing the teacher or covering the next chapter for the sake of covering it. Example: Motivating the magic 1/2 that shows up in many physics equations. These equations are the results of experiments, but the magic of certain constants is often what turns kids off to thinking in physics class; just accept the magic and carry on blindly. The narrative is designed around attacking what students would tacitly accept.
2. Students feel like they’ve somewhat derailed or are in control of where the lesson goes. I might introduce pendulums with this sweet video, but the questions generated are the property of that class.

The grading changes I’ve made that support this type of lesson design and promote student success rather than adverasarial relationships:

• Change the way you use your gradebook.
• Don’t grade work that practices a skill. Only grade valid assessments of those skills. If your students won’t do ungraded practice, then that’s the first philosophical shift you need to help them make. Don’t settle for “my students won’t do ungraded work.” Fix that problem; it’s a disease.
• Allow students to show proficiency however they can. In the end it doesn’t matter what that student does, it matters what they actually learned. This looks like one student writing a paper while another designs an experiment that both show the same proficiency with energy conservation.
• Here’s one that I suck at: find a way to show the public/parents what you are doing such that those people can give students feedback. If the PowerPoint your student just made is destined to rot on a hard drive, that’s not good enough. When parents email me once a week to tell me that their kid was telling them about what happened in class, I feel accomplished. This is embarrassing: parents should always know what’s going on, and they should be pumped about supporting that at home, especially if it’s something they don’t already know about, like, say, um, calculus.

Points for potty passes? Really?