The Boy Who Cried Wolf

One thing I've come to realize is that I love to mess with my students' heads. I know that math can sometimes be a somewhat tedious classroom experience, and so as part of my quest to continually improve the process and make it more enjoyable for everyone involved, one things that I've found that works is to tell stories.

Given, most of the stories that I've told thus far have been rather humdrum, but the key element is to somehow find a way to relate it to math. So for instance, on my first day of school, I told the kids how as I got closer to California, gas went up in price. Being the math-philiac that I am, I told them that I made a function to model the price of gas, and how much it would cost me to fill up my gas tank. See how I pulled math in there? I made a function? Or anther time I talked about how I went to Mexico last summer, and I exchanged some dollars into pesos, ate some awesome Orange Chicken at this restaurant called "The Blue Dolphin", and then on my way back I exchanged my leftover pesos into dollars. I used this example to represent to represent an inverse function. See here? More math.

There are many more examples, but every one of my stories have something in common. They're only loosly based on true life. For instance, I really did go to Mexico, and I really did eat Orange Chicken at the Blue Dolphin. But I didn't exchange any dollars or pesos, and I didn't really make a function for these things. I just tell them that's what I did.

One time I told them that I hiked Timpanogous, which I did, and when I got home from the hike, I wanted to know how high we had gone. So I did some calculations, and made a function that represented how high we hiked. Their reactions to this were absolutely priceless - I heard everything form gasps of amazement to one kids' comment of "Why in the world are you teaching us mathematics?"

The key is to keep the stories common enough that it seems plausible, yet mathematically dorky enough that my students will think "He can't possibly be this nerdy, it can't all be true." I usually leave it up to them to sort out fact from fiction, and it's the best because at the end of class they always have questions about it. I love it.

So on Friday, I couldn't think of a good story to correlate with the content, and so I made up a whopper, that I thought would be particularly outrageous and they would see through it from the start.

I started off telling them about the neighborhood that I had grown up in, how we lived at the bottom of a cul de sac, and there was a line of trees that separated the houses from the field. I then told them how as a child, we spent a lot of time playing in those trees, and in the fields. One summer in particular, we decided to build a fort down in these trees, and as any fort-building-intent youth would do, we started by digging the deepest hole possible.

This is where the story departed from fact. I told them that we dug for a long time, and we found... (Insert dramatic pause. The students are hanging on my last words. Possible answers are being shouted out... "A body!", "A treasure chest!" etc.) A Rock!

"A ROCK!?!? You found a ROCK?"

"Yes, a rock," I say. "But this was no ordinary rock - it was neon green and glowing brilliantly!"

They're eating this up with a spoon. In my mind, I'm simultaneously thinking "I have them!" and "Oh shoot, they're actually believing this..." So as with any good story, when you have your audience captive - I continued.. I told them that none of us had ever seen a rock like this, and we wanted to know what it was. So we took it down to the local university, and showed it to a professor. He told us it was a special rock, that decayed exponentially.

I used this point as an opportunity to teach them that exponential decay was the rate at which something fell apart, or decayed. "Like a corpse?" Yes Patrick, like a corpse. They grasped it pretty quickly, so we moved on.

I then told them that after he told us what kind of rock it was, being the little math-aholic that I am, I rushed home and created a formula to calculate how much of the rock would remain after 600 years from now. And then I used this as a launching pad to introduce the rest of my material.

From my perspective, this was the end of the story. However, what I had failed to notice was that the class had bought my entire story, and in their bright young minds, questions regarding the rock, the professor, and my equation are beginning to burn anxiously in their heads.

We continue with the lesson, we calculate how much of the rock would remain 600 years from now, and they get some practice in. Following the practice, I gave them an assessment to determine how well they had grasped the concept of the day, and for this particular day, they did pretty well. For the most part, they were able to decipher the process of how to solve exponential decay functions, but it revealed to me that their greatest obstacle wasn't with the exponential functions, but with the multiplication and distribution of exponents. Mental note - do some more practice with exponential multiplication.

After the assessment was done, we had about 5 minutes in class left, and the second that I finished gathering it a hand shot in the air.

"Do you still have the rock?"

I checked Kiyah's eyes for intent - she was serious. As I looked around the room, I could tell that she wasn't the only one who wondered about this, and it unleashed a floodgate of questions.

"What did you do with it? How much of it is left? Did you ever figure out what kind of rock it was?" and so forth.

Evidently there was a breakdown in communication somewhere along the line, and in my head either one of three things took place. Either I had seriously misjudged their ability to sort out fact from fiction, I was a much more convincing story teller than I had originally supposed, or these kids placed a whole lot more confidence in me as their teacher than I had ever realized, and as a result clung to the words that left my mouth.

I had to break down at this point, and tell them everything up to the rock part was true. We did find rocks, but none of them were neon green or glowing, we didn't go to the University to get the rock examined, and I never made a function to model the decay of the rock.

The classroom exploded. "So how much of that story was true then?", "I think it was all a lie!", "We can't believe anything you say!", "We're never listening to you again!"

So I'm left the weekend to ponder - were they serious? But in my heart, I know the answer. They loved it, and they want more of it. Just wait until they see what I have for them next week... :)

Some days it blows my mind to think I've only been teaching these kids for three weeks. I feel like I have known them for much, much longer than that. I can only imagine what this is going to be like once I've been with the same kids for an entire year - they'll be like an extension of my family. One week left. This might be harder than I had imagined.