Kickball as Metaphor

As we speak, two classes of 5th grade students are engaged in a
"vigorous" game of kickball. There's thirty-six kids, total, playing.
I watched the game a bit, as I'm sure we all have. One kid pitches,
one kid kicks. Two to four kids throw or run. Thirty-two kids stand
and watch. I was horrified and thought abut all the ways I don't do
that with my instruction. Then, much to my dismay, I thought about
all the ways that I do.

But aren't we all guilty of a little kickball across the curriculum,
---or a lot?

Yesterday afternoon, brain numb from an ugly day, I found myself only
a head of hair away from being Ben Stein in "Ferris Bueller's Day Off"
calling "Anyone… Anyone…" to a silent and disinterested class. I
pitched and a kid kicked, another caught, but most students were just
sitting there.

I always require quiet and focus from my students, but I often delude
myself into thinking that kids who are attentive are engaged. Real
kickball just makes who is active and who is counting flowers a bit
more obvious. In the classroom, we have to remember to ask and
analyze: Even if everyone is watching the game, how many kids are
really playing?

It's not just a direct instruction issue either. Group work is
equally subject to becoming kickball if tasks and roles are not
effectively distributed and evaluated. One or two kids do the work
for their own sake, while the rest coast. The ratio might improve as
the groups get smaller, but the problem remains. Even at half or
two-thirds, is that the best we can do?

Getting out of kickball is simple but exhausting. It is a dozen or
more different routines that must be learned, remembered, taught, and
appropriately brought to bear in different contexts. It is also not
natural to us. Many of us went through school playing kickball,
literally and metaphorically. We have to break the habits that seem
most familiar: popcorn reading to choral reading; QnA to
Think-Pair-Share, call and response, whole class physical response;
teacher demonstrations to student experiments, investigations and
discussions; problems on the front board to each kid with a board;
demanding quiet to demanding tracking, nodding and questions; asking
for hands to randomly calling; test on Friday to a check at the end of
each day. The list can go on.

The problem is also that kickball is easy to play. It's familiar and
even fun. Everyone knows the rules, so the kids aren't complaining or
misbehaving. But, out in the field and on the sideline, they're not
learning either.

Build a Better Mathatude

The longer I live in the adult world of stuff and money, the more I appreciate math and the more opportunities I have to happily wrestle with it. I usually win, but only when I cheat and tag-team with Excel.

Here’s my math homework for the week:

Start with a simple arithmetic problem: You and your partner are deciding what to ship home to the US from China. Nice furniture is inexpensive here and very expensive in the States. Shipping is not cheap though. How much furniture do you have to own to make it worth it?

Add some economics: Decide what is the best way to evaluate the value of the goods. Is it the cost at a Chinese store, its worth in your hearts, the replacement cost in the US, or the substitution cost with the cheapest IKEA/Craigslist goods you can find?

Add some geometry: Shanghai shippers only want to know how many cubic meters you have. You, an American, still think in feet and inches. You have to estimate your furniture and goods interlocked, in boxes and crates, and convert.

Challenge Problem: The cost of shipping space goes up, but not linearly. Determine how to fit the highest value into the best volume for money.

Pop quiz: The Chinese yuan is going to rise soon. You live in China, so you’re paid in yuan, but your salary is fixed in dollars. You can pay for goods in yuan cash or on a dollar-based credit card. You have savings in both currencies. What do you do to avoid losing money?

Enrichment Problem: Interest rates are rising. Do you buy a house sooner, before they get any higher, or later, when they’re high enough to drive down prices? Does it make a difference if you have a 15 or 30-year mortgage, or plan to sell the house within 10 years?

I’m not advocating that we give every child a classroom and focus on the financial problems in Grade 3. Rather, let’s recognize the dual demands of good math education. Kids need to learn enough, well enough, to grapple with complex problems, but they also need to enjoy math enough to try and solve these problems when they actually encounter them.

I like solving these problems. It pays me back very well for my time, and stretches the brain better than a Sudoku. But I think I would be lonely in that opinion.

Far too many adults, including teachers, will happily admit to me that they have “poor math skills.” I don’t believe them. Rather, I think they have a poor math attitude. They’re not unable to determine the best answers for their math dilemmas, they’re unwilling to even try.

My suggestions?

Structurally, we desperately need to find a way to include more finance, statistics and quantitative home economics in the high school curriculum. Then we could teach these topics explicitly. Maybe we need to save calculus for college. Maybe the universities should require these more relevant topics, instead of the futile extra year or two of high-school quality French. But we all know this and the people who make such policy don’t read this blog.

For the individual teacher, here’s my advice:

Don’t reduce the curriculum covered in pursuit of authentic problems. Then people have a great attitude and no skills. Don’t ignore calculators, but don’t let the kids leave thinking that six times eight makes forty-eight because they say so. Don’t pretend you’ll do the pithy word problems at the end of each lesson or the silly “Math in Life” lesson at the end of the unit. They must be skipped in favor of review, remediation, or to accommodate interruptions. But also, don’t do nothing and hope they’ll pick it up elsewhere.

Do use the time after The Tests to go back and apply new skills more deeply. Do reduce the battery of homework to include time for extension problems, and incentivize your kids to actually solve them. Do use “lost days” (sub days, half days, days preceding vacations, etc.) to recapture kids attention with learning-potent breaks in the instructional routine. Do use games, store-bought or home-made, that can force kids to practice this math for you. Do consider family math nights, to engage adults in the learning and perhaps improve the older generations numeracy on the way.

Finally, do let me know how it goes. Next year, I’m back to full-time math teaching. We’ll see if I can practice what I preach.