How To Ruin A Great Math Problem About Stealing Dimes
A couple of weeks ago some people cut the lock on a tractor trailer bound for the Federal Reserve Bank and stole about $200,000 worth of dimes.
Please don’t imagine Dominic Toretto or Danny Ocean or Dalton Russell here—all characters who plotted out highly lucrative heists to perfection. The dime thieves pretty clearly didn’t know what they would be stealing and got in over their heads almost immediately.
The mess, Ryan said, was a result of haphazard improvisation after the thieves realized the bags of dimes in the pallets were too heavy for one person to move. So they broke open the larger bags and loaded them into smaller bags, spilling dimes out of the back of the tractor-trailer and down the road as they made their escape, he said.
Surveillance footage shows one of the getaway cars stopping to steal nearby recycling bins, presumably to use to carry their heavy, unwieldy loot, said Ryan.
US adults have a conviction, most recently expressed by US adults in a Gates Foundation survey, that math class should become more relevant to kids.
Well let me present two math lessons about stealing dimes. Both of them make math class more relevant to kids, but only one of them makes kids more relevant to math class, which is the key to all of this really.
Version #1
Here we give students explicit instructions to perform specific calculations. Math is useful and relevant here, but kids are not!
Version #2
This version includes that exact moment above, but starts with just pictures of coins and questions like:
Were the dime thieves smart or not? Why?
What do you think would have been a smarter coin to steal? Why?
Which coin do you think is heaviest? Rank them on sense memory alone.
What I hope you can see from these two hypothetical lessons (one of which I taught the last time coin thieves made my news) is that they will result in very different experiences for students. Math feels useful in both of them but students only feel useful in the second version.
It’s only in the second version that the estimations, intuitions, hypotheses, arguments, and ideas students bring in from outside of class feel just as useful as the ideas the teacher brings in from mathematics itself.
It is the work students do in a context—estimating, arguing, hypothesizing, etc—that makes it relevant. The context itself lifts very little weight.
And here is the extremely liberating corollary to all of this. Students can bring estimations, intuitions, hypotheses, and arguments to pure mathematics, to the world of numbers and shapes, just as easily as the world of dime thieves. This means students can experience relevance in pure mathematics just as easily as they can in a context outside the classroom.
What Else?
Teachers in Oakland Unified School District, the local school district where I send my kids, went on strike today. I owe so much of my career to the teacher unions who fought for my autonomy to try out new lesson ideas, for class sizes small enough to let me think about student thinking, for time to prepare classes that were worth my students’ time, for income and benefits stable enough to let me invest my mental energy into teaching rather than looking for another job. I owe so much of my own kids’ happiness and developing maturity to the work of public school teachers here in Oakland as well.
Teacher morale feels like it is on a steep slide right now—you feel it and I feel it—and it isn’t always possible to support teacher morale with more than words. But it’s possible here. It’d mean tons to me, and I’m sure OUSD teachers, if you threw even a few bucks over to their strike fund. If you want to press reply here and share a receipt, I’ll match $500 worth from the Mathworlds readership.
I love this post! “The context itself lifts very little weight.” - I think this is the point that is often sorely missed with many “real-world” math lessons, and is one of the reasons why they tend to fall flat. “Student usefulness” seems like a much better goal.