Math Hombre

not last night

My university brought Sir Ken Robinson to campus last night, as a cap to our community reading project and an invited lecture series. See: #SirKenGVSU for the twitter action; university coverage with audio; Dave's reflection on a math story he told.

Beforehand I was wondering how much would be new? I love his two TED talks and the RSA animation and overshare them with students, but you do notice recurring ideas. Appropriately. I also was wondering if he was tall - as he looks imposing in his TED videos. (He's not just not tall, it turns out.)

He's charming, funny and a natural performer. Really funny, like Ricky Gervais as an academic. Inspiring, too, and if you get a chance to see him, take it. He has new PBS special coming up, for his new book, and I will be watching.  He is a self-promoter, and has a robust ego, probably appropriately.

He incorporated his traditional messages:

• creativity is important
• all people are inherently creative
• disbelieve the big three myths about creativity
• creative people are the exception
• creativity is only valid or valuable in the arts
• your creativity is fixed
• current education crushes creativity, or at least discourages it
• people who find their element, the connection between their passion and their creativity,  are happier, healthier, more productive and have greater impact.
• we cannot plan our career, as we have no idea what's coming

His new push was to create a culture of innovation. He seems to see stages of development of creativity:
He applied this mostly to education, talking about Finland and the Blue School (a school designed by the Blue Man Group), and a USC art history grad who went on to become an art evaluator for an auction house, traveling the world.

His upcoming book answers my disappointment with The Element. It's Finding Your Element on how to develop that connection. He also mentioned a major rewrite for the new edition of Out of Our Minds.

My struggles are that his stories, like the art school grad, Blue Men, Johnny Ivo, Nobel winning chemists, etc., confirm the myth of exceptionalism. They don't remind us of the students in our classrooms that we can't get to try. They also tend to wind up with 'and now they're famous and rich.' That is not going to happen for everyone. It can not. Why does his vision look like for me? For that student? (You know the one.) I was glad to hear the Blue Man story, too, because so many of his stories are of the individual, while much of what I know about creativity relies on collaboration.

I'm also left wondering why we can't convince our politicians and decision-makers of the value of this approach to education. Someone asked a question about that, sort of, and Sir Ken joked a response that boiled down to we don't know how. 

Yet, for a couple of hours last night at least, I felt like this is possible. And his encouragement for teachers who are trying to make this difference is very valuable. I was reminded of and consoled by the many teachers I know locally and through the mathtwitterblogosphere who are making these changes happen for real.

¡Viva la revolución!

My favorite TED talk ever was Ken Robinson's message on How Schools Kill Creativity.  He's back with a call for learning revolution.  Bring it on!

I've written about Ken Robinson a few times (One and Two). The idea of creativity in mathematics was a sub-theme for my summer calculus class. Students at the end felt that some of the open-ended assignments (projects of their choice), non-standard problems (like the mobiles) and emphasis on problem solving helped open them up to creativity in math. But they suggested more specific demonstrations of how to be creative. (Boy, is that insightful.)

TED occasionally has question and answer sessions with their speakers who really ignited something with their presentation, and Sir Ken recently did this. (Here's the article.) He addresses math specifically:

"If you want to promote creativity, you need, firstly, to stimulate kids minds with puzzles and questions which will intrigue them. Often that's best done by giving them problems, rather than just solutions. What often happens in classrooms is, kids sit there trying to learn in a drone-like way things of not much interest that have already been figured out.

The best math teachers I know, like the best English teachers, are always giving kids puzzles. They're given things to work on where math skills are required but may not be the focus of the activity. There giving them problems to solve. Or they're made to engage with age-old mathematical problems. For example, I'm thinking about the problem of latitude. How do you go about measuring the planet? I mean, somebody had to do that. How do you do it? Professional mathematicians have such a cornucopia of fascinating puzzles, questions, proposals and conundrums. A great math teacher really has endless opportunities to stimulate kids minds and get them engaged with things they'd probably never thought about before. Rather than just giving them techniques." -Ken Robinson

It's not hugely original, but it's nice to get confirmation of things we believe from outside sources. He touches on engagement several times in the Q&A, and I do believe that's the central issue in teaching, and I love to ponder what is the key for math. Going to more and more of these reading conferences, I am insanely jealous of the teachers who talk about the book that turned a student on to reading. Problems don't seem to have the same effect.

So I showed the Ken Robinson video to my class on the first day and it was quite interesting. The video started with medium engagement, but by the end everyone was tuned in. The story about the choreographer (Gillian Lynne) seemed to really connect.



The first connections were to elements of their own stories, and were interesting. Then one of the students brought up a connection with how Robinson describes us as being educated out of creativity. Her sister is interested in being a soloist, and it took ears of retraining or untraining to get her out of what she had been taught to do as a choral member. I'd never heard of that before, but it connected exactly to the point I wanted to make.

They have been educated - and successfully so, as college calc students - in school mathematics, which has almost nothing to do with mathematics as practiced by mathematicians. (Which really needs a descriptor. Real mathematics isn't going to interest anyone. Creative mathematics? Cool vs. school or cruel mathematics?) Instead of being able to repeat what someone shows you, it should be about solving problems that you don't know how to solve. In which situations mathematicians excel, because they are entirely willing to be wrong, and even glad to be wrong if they learn from it. They're willing to, as my friend Dave says (quoting his favorite Australian, Brian Cambourne) to "Give it a go!"

As long ago as 1982, my calc instructor, John Hocking, worked mightily to convince us to have no fear. To be wrong 100 times if it teaches you something. That math was exploratory, and creative. He shared his topological research with us... which was amazing and fun. He's the reason I added the math major in the first place. Often he put it as "blank pages are just waiting to be filled."

Now can I help my calc students to do the same?

Remember about TED? I stumbled across Thomas Dolby's blog recently (I was a geek in the 80s, of course I like Dolby), and have been reading through back posts. He posted this link from TED that I thought was unreal. Ken Robinson is an expert on creativity, and funny besides. If Ricky Gervais had become an academic...

His point is about how we are born creative and educated out of it. An outside observer would think "The whole purpose of public education is to produce university professors." But he goes on to describe how we have convinced the majority of people that the things they are good at and interested in are not valued or even stigmatized.

So... what to do about it? I'm going to show this to my Calc 2 students on Monday and see what they think.