Radical Equations

Radical Equations

I just finished Robert Moses' Radical Equations, a fascinating read that connects the civil rights movement, in particular in Mississippi, with the need for better Math education.

In both cases, it is young people who recognized that a certain set of knowledge leads to better opportunities, whether these are political (voter registration, voting rights, voting access) or economic (Algebra as the gatekeeper course in high school for access to education geared towards computing), and through their organization they were able to force the established power structure to change culture (albeit very slowly and hesitantly).

As Math is too often seen as a skill that you either have or you don't, connecting Math learning with relevant cultural and historical experiences has been a successful strategy to get poor, mostly minority students interested in Algebra.  While I think you should read the book yourselves, here are the five steps for the Algebra Project curriculum:
1. Physical Events -- the trip has at least two purposes. It gives students a real experience with a cultural or historical moment, and it gives the physical experience of traveling along a certain set of paths, covering certain distances.
2.  Pictorial Representation/Modeling -- students need to find an individual way of translating the trip experience into something abstract, so after the travel comes the reflection that is based on an image or model
3.  Intuitive Language/"People Talk" -- students continue reflecting on the trip by using their own language.
4.  Structured Language/"Feature Talk" -- the reflection of step 3 is analyzed for mathematical features such as start, finish, direction, distance
5. Symbolic Representation - the final step is turning the findings into symbols that can be understood by the whole group.

Tradeline 2018

With a couple of colleagues, I attended this year's Tradeline conference with its focus on STEM and lab buildings to see if we can gather ideas for our next classroom building that will incorporate teaching lab spaces for a couple of different disciplines.

Clearly, lots of places are building lots of very interesting buildings right now, though sometimes the small tweaks may be the most interesting.  On the first day, we toured Tufts University's new teaching and research lab building, where a couple of features struck me as interesting.

cloth wall

1. walls made out of cloth outside of faculty offices so that notes can easily be pinned to them. 2. integration of art that connects to the science in the building

art in science

translucent office windows

 3. lots of natural light but translucent glass to provide privacy

Power cords from ceiling

4.  Retractable power cords from the ceiling

passthrough window

ladders for storage

5. a pass-through window between a prep and a teaching lab that can be covered up by a white board
6.  Ladders to extend storage up to the ceiling.

Other ideas I gathered over these two days included the reminder that Art programs really could do some amazing things with augmented and virtual reality as the current exhibit of Art in the Age of Internet showed.

Use unusual spaces for unusual projects - Lehigh University was able to take over an old factory and started turning its spaces into creation and experimental spaces

Ask the right kinds of questions - broad, open for innovation, specific and targeted for keeping with the status quo.