Badly Gamified Classroom

So I’ll trumpet the value of teachers crossing the streams of classroom craft and personal interest, but I want to recognize the risks involved.

Success comes form mingling areas of deep content knowledge, exposing and exploiting structural similarities. If you try that with surface level knowledge, you can dig yourself a double-deep pit.  I sure did.

After a few years of teaching I stumbled into the tail end of the Forge-RPG community and the early-mid part of the indy/story game explosion. Although it’s been abandoned by real RPG theorists, the Game/Simulation/Narrative trifold model had a profound effect on my teaching.

Like most new teachers, I was developing my practice in the space between the obvious influence of my (superb!) mentor teachers and my own internalized (often unconscious) experiences as a student. My personal classroom “innovation” had been to phrase and present many of the traditional classroom routines as “health bars” and “super meters.” I was reskinning a process I had found bewildering and arbitrary as a student in language that was more personally palatable.

That some middle school kids wouldn’t immediately grok how bulletin board of homework keys signaled when the next quiz happened didn’t even occur to me. That it actively worked AGAINST my stated goals for how students would learn to play with mathematics was absolutely invisible. Looking back, I had gameified my classroom using nothing but construction paper, but still managed to anticipate all of the nasty, extrinsic motivation problems we’ve seen explored in badge-laden startups over the last few years.

It’s not that classroom activity maps exactly onto RPG theory. Rather, playing Sorcerer / Dogs in the Vineyard / etc showed me that the mechanical structure of an RPG system mattered, and could really shape what kind of game emerged from play. That revelation pushed me to examine my teaching practice again, to see my classroom structures as modest tweaks to a system that expressed radically different goals. I had built house rules that emphasized a version of “winning” math class, while I was trying to present math as a “story” of personal learning and discovery.

The next few years were messy ones. I lost all of my high-concept bulletin boards, lost the routines and structure that had expressed the day by day tempo of the classroom. What started to emerge was the core of my new teaching practice, focused on helping students find new, personal, empowering stories to fuel their learning and discovery.

Andrew Watt is correct when he recognizes that educators are game designers of sorts. (I also appreciate that the story that led to his contributions to Exalted are a classic example of the benefits of farting around online).  Like RPG designerns, our best work happens when we’re honest and clear about our all the paramaters of our creative agenda.

Veggie Juice and Feedback Loops

This post is about living an integrated life, confident that my ideas and interests will loop around.

I’m not sure I believe in nutrients.

I’d love to say that I had some highbrow Pollan-esque justification for this, a rejection of overhyped pop nutrition science, but really I think it’s just cause I’m a curmudgeon. Nutrients? Micro-nutrient? Colloids? Humbug.

My unbelief is roughly equivalent to the unbelief of collegiate agnostics. The problem seems huge and complicated, significant enough to transform how someone lives their life, but nuanced enough that no evidence can exist without scores of footnotes and caveats. Worse yet, the people who are trying hardest to sway you can be real jerks about it.

Recently I decided to take Pascal’s Wager on nutrition and buy a juicer. Pollan says it we can’t be sure the multivitamins are actually beneficial but demographically it make sense to be a person who takes multivitamins. I’m putting juicing in the same category. Even without micro-phyto-nutrients and minerals, I don’t see a lot of downside to replacing a cereal/toast/chorizo breakfast with 2 pounds of spinach or kale or cucumbers or celery.

I handeled this like nerds do. Read a gadget review, watched juicing videos for 3 days, watched the juicing infomercial of the moment, and bought a juicer. I subjected my G+ friends to the inevitable barrage of “what’s Andrew juicing today” pictures.

And then I made a math video.

Any questions?

My life is a constant cycle of new fascinations, and I’m not under any delusion that the subjects I find interesting are intrinsically interesting to students. But when there’s a knotty problem that I can’t shake from my head, I’ve learned that there’s probably something that can refine into perplexity.

My job as an educator is to use what fascinates me to share and teach a framework for viewing a fascinating world.

Kids don’t care about veggie juice, although there’s a pretty universal reaction to watching me pour a glass of it. Hopefully that moment of strangeness can build a window into the perplexing interplay of cost, time, and (sigh) nutrients.

Drawing in the sand counts as paperless

Steve Katz (@stevekatz) asked about running a paperless math classroom earlier today and, after the third tweet, I realized that this was not a topic built for 140 character chunks. What little I saw of the discussion (no hashtag!), and my initial responses, focused on tools for formalizing math symbols without paper. While important, I think that view is a bit narrow.

I went through a very typical, wealthy suburban public school system and disliked math all the way through 12th grade. I then hit a transformative teacher, got a BA in Math and taught 6th-9th grade math in CA public and independent schools for 6 years. I’m not trying to present myself as “real” mathematician or a superb math teacher, just that I’ve done a lot of different kinds of math in a variety of settings. I went in to teaching middle school math remembering nothing but my dislike of those classrooms, and tried to do better.

The Paperless Friday project makes all kind of sense as an exercise, as a broadside against complacency and un-reflective teaching practice, and as a lens through which to reevaluate our classrooms. But, to be clear, no one talks about the “paperless classroom” because they’re deeply concerned that we’ll wake up one day without paper. Paperless matters because, as my CS/CE/EE friends always taught me, “you can’t grep dead trees.” Paper is isolated, static yet ephemeral . Paperless is linkable, connected, mutable but phenomenally persistent. I’m fine with “Paperless Fridays” being a literal statement – – and there’s certainly a bunch to do with math on a Friday like that — but I think that the ideal paperless math classroom will still have a fair amount of writing.

That said, as traditionally taught 6-12 Math certainly has a paper fetish. Breaking that fascination can start really low-tech with a class set of whiteboard slates. Having students work any written exercises on a slate means that the only way to assess it is to observe directly, being present and mobile in the classroom. If such a thing as “notes” matter, they should be provided though IWB slides or video, and save class time for the actual working of math. (For several years, I tried to order 2’x4′ whiteboard stickers to cover entire tabletops in my room as a collaborative work space, but they were always backordered into oblivion come September.) The key is to honor and value written work by giving it a place in class, with peers participating and with your full attention.

As an aside, one of our math teachers uses the classroom network set from TI , where the individual graphing calculators can all dump their screen to the projector, and the teacher can push problems and quizzes out to the devices. It’s a neat system, albeit a costly, proprietary, and inflexible one. I would feel much better about if that tool set then encompassed *all* of their brute calculate/solve/simplify/graph work, and the rest of the class focused on something richer.

In math circles Lockhart’s Lament (PDF Link) is pretty ubiquitous, and it’s ABSOLUTELY worth a read if you haven’t seen it before. He savages what we recognize as the “standard” math curriculum for being the soul-killing, joy-depriving sausage mill that it is, and pushes us towards a math classroom built around actually doing math. From his central example, the notion of running a paperless math classroom should be as simple as running a paperless music classroom. Focus on composition, on solving genuine problems, on argument and exploration, rather than on rules, system or on any technique that starts with STEP 1.

Here’s where tools might be useful. A simple Google Doc with rich TeX equations might well be a better collaborative medium than the paper-version, although I will still stand up for anyone’s right to think with a pen in hand. @teachpaperless suggested Wiziq, which I haven’t looked through, but any non-tablet mode of math publication going to involve some combination of choosing symbols form a menu and/or typing mark-up. While it’s a little hurdle (especially for younger students), it’s the price of all those great “paperless” adjectives from earlier. Take real mathematical thinking, use open and free tools to create the open/shareable document of their process. Take their writing and put it where people can see, read, comment and link. Take their songs and put them up as CC-licensed mp3/oggs, or as remixable GarageBand tracks. Treat math for what it is, another beautiful product of the human imagination.

Alternately, you could just hand them all iPod Touches with twitter clients and have them do arithmetic drills via tweets and gather the responses on the board with TwitterFall. I’d suggest #missingthepoint as your tag.