Great Moments in Teaching: The Charge

Friday, two weeks from the end of school, and it’s rally schedule: chop off fifteen minutes from each block for a screaming session in the gym. It’s fourth block, my trig class, and although I try not to have favorites, this semester has been a bit low on students with energy and ability. But even the goof-offs in this class can remember the basics of trig, have put some effort into memorizing the unit circle, reciprocal values, the occasional Pythagorean identity,  know the difference between sine and cosine graphs.  And only two cheaters. The top kids are amazing, enthusiastic, and driven–and there are lots of them, many of whom I just taught Algebra 2.  So a fun class, and really the only one with a genuine personality this semester.

I had given them some extra time to finish up a test from the day before, and it’s now just 35 minutes to rally.

“OK, I want to cover a couple things to set up Monday. Let’s….”

“NOOOOOOO!!!!” the blast of complaints hit me. I turned around and glared.

“Come on! It’s Friday! You can’t make us learn something new!” Tre, who last had a math teacher that wasn’t me in freshman algebra, put on his most ingratiating grin.

“It’s so hot, and my brain hurts. Please, no more math!” Patti slumped dramatically.

“QUIET!” I turned back from drawing a cosine graph to bellow them into submission.

“I just want to introduce a couple of interesting properties and get you thinking, once again, about…oh, for christ’s sake.”

“WHAT??? What happened?” the students crane their heads forward to see the object of my irritation. I was growling at a student whiteboard sitting on a desk.

“Oh, some student used a fricking sharpie to draw a self-portrait.” and I held up the board so the class could see the penis.

“HAHAHAHAHA!” TJ was cracking up and I whirled at him furiously.

“You know, we use these white boards every day, and if I can’t get the sharpie off, it’s ruined. You think it’s FUNNY that students destroy my stuff?”

TJ was genuinely puzzled. “No. You just called him a dick. Like, without saying so. That was cool.”

“Fine. Ruin the fun of yelling at you. Take one more ounce of joy from my day.” I grinned at him and sprayed cleaner on the board.

“Ain’t no cleaner taking off sharpie,” Ahmed sympathized.

“Dude, this is Kaboom,” Tre said. “Kaboom’s the bomb.”

“Best cleaner in the known universe.” I spray the board and let it sit. All my kids know I love Kaboom. I tell new teachers about Kaboom, an essential teaching tool. When the kids write F*** in Sharpie, it’s so incredibly satisfying to wipe the obnoxiousness out of existence with one spray. Lesser challenges–gang graffiti, pencil sketches, soda spills, even small patches of gum–all disappeared.

“I hate students, dammit.” I turned back to the board. “I mean, don’t get me wrong. I love you all. But I just hate students. Ruin my stuff, treat it like crap….” I stop, because students breaking my stuff can put me in a foul mood in a hurry.

“It wasn’t us!” Matteo protested.

“Dude, it was you.”

“Screw you, Furio, how do you know?”

“Cuz you’re a dick! That’s your picture!”

I laughed, feeling much better. “Look, back to work. So you know how there’s a line, and then we can square a line, or multiply it by another line, to get a…”

“Parabola,” a reasonable amount of the class chorused, but I could hear talking.

“Shush, whoever’s talking. What happens when we square the cosine function? Take a look at the function and let’s just square what we….BE QUIET BRIAN..see. Cosine starts at…QUIET.” I turn around, wait for quiet. “Cosine starts at what, Furio?”

“1.”

“So 1 squared is..?”

“1”.

I mark (0,1) in a different color, and move to the next hashmark. “Cosine is zero at pi over 2, zero squared is…QUIET.”

Most kids were paying attention, but there was this low level nattering that rose up every time I turned to the board.  But we got through the first one quickly.

“So here’s the square of the cosine function. What do you notice?”

“It’s a cosine graph!” Vicky.

“Sure looks like it. Period? Amplitude?” and we identified all the parameters for a cosine function graph.

So the square of the cosine function can also be expressed as a regular cosine graph. Amplitude and vertical shift, one half, period one half the usual.”

Ahmed said with faux judiciousness, stroking his chin, “Ah, but how do we know this? It might just look like a cosine graph!”

“Good question. We can see the key points work, but maybe that’s just a coincidence. So pick a value and let’s plug it in. QUIET!”

“How about pi over six?”

Carla was impressed. “Wow, when you double the value, it becomes something entirely different.”

“Yes….QUIET!!! I’m always surprised at how the alignments happen. So now let’s go on to the sine function. What do you all think will happ….QUIET!”

“Jesus Christ, Eduardo and Brian, will the two of you shut.up.? NO! Stop the innocent ‘who me?’ crap. Three times in the past three minutes. I tell you to be quiet, turn to the promethean, turn around and there you are yapping again. Do I need to move you?”

Eduardo (Manuel‘s younger brother) and Benny look abashed, hearing the edge in my voice. I was mad at myself more than anything these two had done. Note to new teachers: don’t push through without attention. Constantly shushing is a sign you don’t own the room..  Don’t push through, stop when you need to. And it wasn’t an accident I’d picked two of the top kids in the class to shut down; it showed everyone else I was serious, if the unusual edge in my voice wasn’t enough.

By now I was furious with myself, and boy, do I get global in a hurry. My rotten students ruin my whiteboards and never shut up. I’m an idiot who decided to teach something complex 30 minutes before the weekend. And there are times when I’ve decided it’s not worth it and call it quits–call a pop quiz, put a problem on the board as an exit ticket, something. But deep breath, act like nothing happened, and push on, vowing to give it one more shot before I bail on an exit ticket activity.

“Wait.” Joanie, probably my top math student this year, sat up and scowled at the graph dots. “How can that be a cosine, too? That’s weird.”

“What kind of cosine function? What’s different?”

“It’s reflected. So cosine squared is cosine, and sine squared is negative cosine?”

“Looks like it.”

“But what’s the point of this?” Vicky asked. “Since squaring a sine or cosine function just takes you back to cosine, why do it?”

“Well, math applications will quite often require you to square functions, so it’s good to know how they behave. However, I really just want you to think about exploring functions. Up to now, you’ve been working primarily with transformations or known formats with parameters you can just plug in. But now we’re investigating functions that aren’t familiar with. Notice, too, that we did this all graphically with a minimum of evaluation.”

“So just for fun, what if we add the two functions we just created?”

“Here they are together. So let’s add the five primary points.”

TJ puzzled. “They’re all one? Really? That’s weird.”

“Yeah, but you can see it in the graphs,” Juan observed. “They’re equal at one-half, at opposite ends at one.”

I join all the points.

“So the graph y= cosine squared plus sine squared is always….”

“One!” the class chorused.

And then I threw out casually, oh so casually, “And cosine squared plus sine squared is…”

“One!…”

The pause was the best part. I looked down, and waited as the recognition grew, until by god, the entire room was shouting in approval, clapping and stomping.

It’s one of those things that maybe you had to be there. But in half an hour, at the end of a day, in hot weather, right before a rally and a weekend, I’d not only gotten those kids to apply their knowledge of trig graphs in a new approach, but draw a connection from graphic to algebraic. They hadn’t recognized the familiar equation because their minds were in “graph” mode, and only when I asked about a Pythagorean identity, using almost exactly the same words, did they realize that they already knew what the graph would show. But not until then.

And they thought it was really cool that I’d pulled them around to this recognition.

Literally, a minute of stomping until I waved it down. “All right! Thank you. Remember during the first week, when I told you I’m a stickler for understanding the connection between algebraic and visual representations? Here you go.”

And then, “But what about tangent? What happens when you square that?”

Ten minutes left and I’ve got them asking questions. I realized I haven’t had to shush them once.

And just as the bell rings, we established that tan²(x) + 1 = sec²(x).

The kids rushed out to the rally. Rallies are my one Bad Teacher thing: I don’t go. I checked the whiteboard, Kaboom had wiped out most of the damage. Then I walked to Starbucks just completely charged, reliving the math and the applause. All the yelling, all the grouchiness, wiped away. I’d killed.

I keep telling you: Teaching is a performance art.

 

Teaching with Indirection

Technology is a great illustrator and indispensable for presentation. But as a student tool? Eh, not so much. Certainly not laptops.   I found laptops very useful in my history class, but primarily as a delivery and retrieval mechanism, or for their own presentations.  I haven’t found that a compelling reason to submit to the logistics of handing out and collecting laptops. But then, I’m a Luddite on this.  Recently, some colleagues were jazzed with several thousand dollars of cool science tools which I oohed and ahhed over politely. But….? Basically data collection. Fast data collection, which the students can analyze.  I guess. I don’t really do science.

A couple months ago, I used laptops and Desmos to teach transformations, and after two blocks that went….well, I suppose, I used whiteboards to do the same lesson in the last block. Far superior. I wouldn’t have even considered the hassle, but last year the school decided all algebra 2 teachers warranted a laptop cart and I want to occasionally acknowledge a gift intended to be useful. I would never–I mean no excuses never–book a laptop cart from the library to teach a lesson. But if it’s sitting around my classroom, I’m bound to try and find a way to use it. Still, even if I had a lesson that would be guaranteed superior to the same lesson on paper, I’d be tough to convince. Taking them out and putting them away takes up close to 15 minutes of classtime. Wasted. If all of my students had their laptops with them at every minute, waiting to be used….maybe. I’ve certainly found uses for phones on an occasional basis. But it’s not a huge gap I’m longing to fill.

Teaching is performance art. Sometimes the art lies in holding students’ attention directly, taking them point by point through a new topic. Other times, it lies in making them do the work. In both cases, the art lies in the method of revealing, of making them come along for the ride of understanding–even if it’s just in that moment.

It’s hard to do that if you put technology in the students’ hands. First, they’re too easily distracted. Second, it’s too easy to do without understanding.  A colleague of mine simply worships Dan Meyer, and loves all the Desmos activities.  They are neat. Without question or caveat. But I have limited time, and I’d rather have my students doing math directly, by hand even, than have them work on laptops or phones. Some Desmos activities do, absolutely, require the kids to work or show their math directly. Others are an interesting form of guess and check, designed (hopefully) to help kids understand patterns. The first, I like, but am unconvinced that the time and distraction suck are an improvement over handwritten work. The second, no. Not generally interested unless I have time for games, and I don’t.

This piece is only partially about technology, though. I wanted to talk about designing experiences, and for me, technology doesn’t give me the freedom to do that. Not with my kids, ability levels, and existing technology, anyway.

But how can I claim that technology is a distraction if I’m busy performing for the students?

Well, recall I said it was great for illustration and presentation. I love my smartboard, although I move pretty effortlessly between smartboards and whiteboard walls.

I have learned it’s very simple to screw up a lesson by speeding it up, but far more difficult to do slowing it down. I like introducing a topic, sometimes in a roundabout way, and having the students do the work alongside. Consider the example displayed here. These aren’t power points of my lecture. I start with a blank screen. I give the instructions, give the kids time to follow along, then use their input to make my own diagram. That way I can circle around, see that everyone’s on track, understanding the math, seeing connections.

I spend a great deal of time looking for ways to build instruction step by step, so that the vast majority of my students have no reason to refuse the effort. Draw a square. How hard is that? Besides, most of them enjoy drawing and sketching, and this beats posters.

Ideally, I don’t want them to see where we’re going. But then, remember I’m teaching advanced high school math. At various times, I want students to understand that math discoveries don’t always go where they were expected. The best way to do that, in my experience, is give them a situation and point out obvious things that connect in not so obvious ways.

Thus, a trigonometry class is a great place to start an activity that begins as a weird way of breaking up a square into similar triangles. The sketches in the first steps are just a way to get them started, suspend their disbelief.  The real application of knowledge begins at this step, as they identify the equivalent ratios for the different triangles. A geometry-level skill, one from two years ago, and one we try to beat into their heads. Proportionality, setting up cross products, is also something students have been taught consistently.  A trig class is going to have a pretty high percentage of functional students who remember a lot of what they’ve been taught a lot.

Which is important, because this sort of activity has to be paced properly. You have to have a number of pauses while students work independently. The pauses can’t be too short–you have to have time to wander around and explain–but not explain everything to everyone, which would take too long and kill the mood. Can’t be too fast, either, or why bother?

Ideally, students should be mildly mystified, but willing to play along. As I wrote several years ago, start slow, build student trust in your wild notions. If you keep them successful and interested, they’ll follow along working “blind”, applying their existing knowledge without complaint. Don’t deliver and they won’t follow. Which is why it’s important to start slow.

So in this particular activity, the students drew a square, some triangles, and found ratios without knowing when, or if, this was going to relate to trigonometry. Now, finally, they are using class-related knowledge, although SOHCAHTOA is technically covered in geometry and only reviewed in the early months of the year. But at least it does have something to do with Trig.

I’ve only done this once, but I was surprised and fascinated to note that some students were annoyed that I reminded them about the 1 unit substitution after they’d built the proportion statements.  I liked the structured approach of two distinct moves. They didn’t. “Why you make us do this twice?” griped Jamal, who is better at math than you might expect from his pants, defying gravity far south of his pelvis, much less his perpetually red-eyed stupor and speech patterns. (“He’s a c**n,” he informed me about a friend a month ago. I stared at him. “It’s okay. I’m half c**n, so I can say  that.  Like, my family, we all light-skinned but we c**ns.” I stared at him. “OK, I ain’t no c**n in your class.” I mentioned the discussion to an admin later, suggesting perhaps Jamal needed to be told that c**n isn’t n****r , and is an insult in any vernacular. “C**n?” she said, puzzled.  “Like….raccoon?” It took me a few minutes to realize that she was a Hispanic, so it was indeed possible she had no idea what the word meant. I should have gone to our African American admin.)

It’s not obvious to all students that the ratio labeling each triangle side is the length of that side. That is, if the base is one, then the length of the secant line will be the exact value of the secant ratio, and so on. Breaking the diagram into three distinct triangles helps, but I do recommend spending some time on this point.

So, for example, say if the angle is 30 degrees, what length would the side labeled sine be? What about cotangent? They already know about sine and cosine lengths, since I introduce this after we’ve covered the basics of the unit circle. But it helps to prod them into realizing that the cosecant length would be 2 units, and so on.

My students are familiar with my term “mother ship”. I use it in a number of contexts, but none so commonly as the Pythagorean Theorem. I ask them if they’ve seen Independence Day,  or one of the other zillions of alien invasion flicks in which the little independent saucers  all go back to the big behemoth. Because aliens will centralize, else how could humans emerge victorious? Just as all these little buzzing pods lead back to the big one, so too do so many ideas lead back to Pythagorean. Even its gaps. The Pythagorean Theorem doesn’t do angles, I point out. That’s why we started using trigonometry to solve for sides of right triangles. Originally, trigonometry was developed thousands of years ago to explain planetary motion, and was defined entirely in terms of spheres and chords. Not until Copernicus, a few hundred years ago, did we start to define trigonometry primarily in terms of right triangles.

Until this activity, I’d always taught the Pythagorean identities algebraically. I start, as many do, by reminding or introducing them to the equation for a circle, then talk about a radius of one, and so on. Then I derive the secant/tangent and cosecant/cotangent versions, which is pretty simple.

But I really like the geometric representation. The three triangles are spatial, physical artifacts of what is otherwise a very abstract concept. Ultimately, of course, these identities are used for very abstract purposes, but whenever possible, links to the concrete are welcome.

Besides, isn’t it cool that the three triangles reflect what the algebra shows? I suppose the fact that the triangles are all similar plays into it, but I’m not enough of a mathie to grasp that intuitively. The students, of course, don’t yet know the algebra. The Pythagorean identities are the one new fact set this lesson delivers.

Remember, I don’t use these images you see here in the lesson; rather, they represent a combination of what I say and draw during the lesson, pausing as the students work things out themselves.  Could I do this with technology? Sure. Could they? In my opinion, no. But it’s debatable, certainly. BUT–I also couldn’t do this with a book.
Is it just me, or do students take an absurdly long time, over many lessons and with many reminders,  to memorize the unit circle? I mean, my god, there are five values for each ratio. They go in order–big to small, small to big. How hard could it be? But after a couple years of students looking at me blankly at the end of the term when asked what the sine of pi over 6 is, I’ve learned to beat it into their heads. Some teachers never use the unit circle to teach ratios. I do not understand this. Steve teaches it all with co-functions and trig tables; I have taught any number of his students who know vaguely what it is, but have no conceptual understanding of it. They know the values, their operational ability is no different, but where’s the fun? The unit circle is an amazing entity.

I am a big fan of Desmos. At algebra 2 and higher, I ask my students to download the Desmos app. My students learn how to graph, how to create functions, how to explore functions. I want them to know Demos as a tool when it makes sense. Really.

So eventually–although I haven’t done it yet–I’m going to show my students this puny effort to automate the concepts we explored manually in this lesson.  Hey, I can use the laptops! It will be a great example of inverse calls.

But not right away. Look, my classes do a lot of repetition.  Plenty of worked problems. It’s not all discovery or exploration–in fact, relatively little time is spent on these. My students need to know how, building capacity. Why is the glue. The better a student is at the basics of math, the more important it is to smack them around with why, occasionally.

But I’m a performer.  English teachers talk about grabbing up front with the hook. But in math, ending big, revealing the path they’ve been wandering, is my goal. So when I draw in the circle, put in the coordinates, and hear “Holy sh**!” and various stunned gasps, following by a smattering of applause, I know my planning paid off.

“The f***? Damn. This been the unit circle all along. Shee-it.” That would be Jamal.