SPEAKER_04 0:00

Where else are we gonna find a teacher who's willing to stand in front of the the classroom and sing the quadratic formula song to Pop Goes the Weasel?

SPEAKER_03 0:12

We've all been there. Right, right. And you're like, ah man. Uh but that's it.

SPEAKER_00 0:22

Welcome to Room to Grow. I'm Curtis Brown. And I'm Joni Funderberg. We work together at Texas Instruments, and we're glad you're here.

SPEAKER_04 0:29

We're looking forward to continually improving our practice, and we understand that you are too.

SPEAKER_00 0:33

We hope that you'll find this podcast as a room for you to grow along with us as we wrestle with and explore ideas about teaching math even better. You know, sometimes math gets a bad rap, but there's a lot of fun to be had with math memes, puns, and jokes that make students and teachers see and appreciate the lighter side of math. In this episode, Curtis and I share some of our favorite math funnies and talk about how and why this silly content can be an important part of building classroom culture and positive relationships with students. We hope you enjoy the conversation as much as we did. So let's get growing.

SPEAKER_04 1:09

Well, Joni, it's really exciting to be recording our first episode for the 2023 season. I can't believe we're starting our third season of Room to Grow podcast. It's really exciting to be doing that today.

SPEAKER_01 1:22

I know woo-hoo for season three. It's really exciting. I think when we came up with this idea a few years ago, you know, this burst out of COVID podcast, um, I I had no idea we'd go this long, but it's been so much fun. And I'm excited to start season three with a with an episode that is really about having fun too. So um, you know, this is this will be a great chance for us to to just tap, talk, and have some light conversation and hopefully our audience will enjoy and relate to uh what we have planned for today.

SPEAKER_04 1:53

Yeah, I know sometimes math gets kind of a bad rap, and we as math teachers sometimes get touted as as uh, you know, kind of these stern, strict people, and we don't have a whole lot of fun and that kind of thing. But I think in general, most math teachers would kind of agree that we appreciate some of the good, fun things that you can find out there on the internet. Uh that kind of poke fun at some of the things that we do and say in mathematics. Um, and so I think uh today, what our goal is, one of our goals uh for today is to just kind of uh talk a little bit about what kind of makes us laugh in mathematics, what we want to kind of look at. Maybe we'll we'll even uh present some things that we're gonna uh maybe groan about. So I've brought in some memes and some gifts that I think you have too. Uh and we're just gonna kind of talk through a couple of those things um and we'll see where this episode goes and just kind of have a little bit of fun with it. So uh what why don't we just dive in uh and look at maybe a couple of these uh these first uh ones here because it's kind of the snowy season where um you're in Denver, so that's really nice uh that you've got some some uh cold weather, maybe even a little snow on the ground. Is that true?

SPEAKER_01 3:07

Uh we have a little snow on the ground and we're expecting more snow later, but um yeah, that that definitely that first one really speaks to me of um uh getting out in the snow and as a math person drawing uh a snow angle.

SPEAKER_04 3:24

Yes. So I found yeah, I found this uh this one for our listeners here. And you you guys will post all of these links to these uh memes and gifts and posts that people have made on Twitter, etc. Um, we'll uh post links to those in the show notes. So the first one we're gonna talk about is this uh this one I found, this tweet that was made by Stem Park, uh, and it says, uh, I made a math, I made a snow angle today. It's a cute one. And they've got a little uh snow uh snow angle uh in the ground there with a measurement, and uh they've got an acute angle uh on there. I thought it was just kind of a a fun kind of making me groan type uh math meme. Totally that I saw.

SPEAKER_01 4:08

Well, that's what this one spoke to me a little bit too because angle and angel, I uh every single time have to stop and think, and often we'll we'll mess those two up. For sure. Yes, could I definitely could definitely appreciate that.

SPEAKER_04 4:24

No, that's totally uh I thought that was a really I thought that was really a pretty funny uh place to start.

SPEAKER_01 4:30

It's a it's a good one to start at. And you know, I I think this brings out kind of the maybe goofy uh humor that a lot of math educators that I know uh have. It it takes me back, Curtis, to my first year of teaching. And I was teaching out of an algebra one textbook. I certain it's not in existence anywhere anymore because that was such a long, long time ago. But um, when I would be lesson planning at home on the weekends, I would be reading through this book and just like cracking up and laughing to the point of crying while I was lesson planning. And my husband Jeff would come over and be like, What is so funny? Like, you're planning algebra lessons. Why are you laughing until you're crying? But they had um, they had all of these like puns within the word problems. No joke. So they would do, oh my gosh, they would do like um Victor, who always wins, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Like all of the names of the characters within the word problems were puns. And I think part of it was like the stress of being a first-year teacher and the complete exhaustion I felt every weekend of just, you know, sort of recovering from the week. But I would laugh to the point of tears just reading through um Doug Up the Ditcher, the ditch digger found that when he juggled.

SPEAKER_04 5:54

Oh, that's terrible. Terrible. That's so terrible. That's that's like that's kind of like the math jokes or the dad math jokes that I tell my kids. How about how about this one? How about this one? Just to lay another one on you. How about this? So parallel lines have so much in common. Isn't it a shame they'll never meet?

unknown 6:15

That's terrible.

SPEAKER_04 6:17

I mean, come on. That's the kind of stuff that we as math teachers have so much fun with, um, I think all the time. And, you know, it's it's worth it to have this kind of fun, right? Like when we can start our math classes with this kind of thing. I think you were telling me the other day that you had uh a teacher that um you knew who um actually started their classroom every day with some sort of a math teach math pun or math gif or something like this.

SPEAKER_01 6:47

Yeah, exactly. So I I had the pleasure of being invited back into a math classroom at the last school that I taught at. So shout out to Rachel Narcissi at Grandview High School in Aurora, Colorado. Um, Rachel is a fantastic teacher, and I got to come in as her students were doing some presentations, and I got to come in and serve as a you know out outside of the school panelist at her student presentations, and I got to see that she um starts every class period with a math ton, and she puts it up like under her document camera. Um, so the one that she started with that the day that I was there last week, um, it said, I've created a graph uh of my past relationships.

SPEAKER_04 7:33

Oh no.

SPEAKER_01 7:36

It has an it has an X axis spelled E X and a Y axis spelled W H Y.

SPEAKER_04 7:46

Oh dear. Oh dear.

SPEAKER_01 7:51

But one of the fun things one of the fun things that she did was um like she has these, they're cards. So like on the front of the card it said, I created a graph of my past relationships. And then before she turns it over, she lets her kids guess what you know, what's on the other side or what would be the punchline or what would be the pun here. So I thought that's a really fun way um to kind of start your class. And you know, I I when I was in the classroom, I too tried to poke fun at some of the ridiculous things that often happen in math class or in the math textbook. Um, and I found one, Curtis, about what does Bob have now is is the image I want to talk about really quickly. And this is again poking fun at some of the ridiculous things. So thinking about the word problems. I know there was a peanuts cartoon a long time ago about you know, who buys 39 grapefruits and nobody thinks that's weird. So this one is similar to that. And it goes, Bob has 36 candy bars, he eats 29. What does he have now? The student response is diabetes. Bob has diabetes.

SPEAKER_04 9:02

That's fantastic. And you know what, students sometimes call us out on the questions that we ask. As a matter of fact, yeah, yeah, totally. That uh that's a big that's a big deal, right? Like we we sometimes propose these uh these questions and we kind of create context in which uh you know it makes sense that we've got this problem and we're trying to get at some uh standard or some uh piece of knowledge that the students um are, you know, they need to be able to know. And so we've got this contrived sort of uh uh situation and scenario, and then they kind of call us out on the ridiculousness of said uh scenario. That there's another one that I brought uh that brings up uh actually a thought. There's another one of these that I brought in uh with me that uh I thought was kind of cool. There's a it's a prompt uh and it says write a seven-digit number that has the digit six in the ten thousands place. And so the student wrote a beautiful seven-digit number, six million six hundred and sixty-six thousand six hundred sixty-six.

SPEAKER_01 10:10

Well, it is a seven-digit number that has the digits six, and it's got a six in the ten thousands place.

SPEAKER_04 10:17

Uh the student really just cleverly figured out a great way to answer that response. Um, and calling out, you know, calling us out on like okay, I can meet that standard. I can answer that. Uh for sure.

SPEAKER_01 10:35

For sure. I and that just totally brings to mind like I can just picture all of the students that I've taught over the years that would have been the ones to come up with that exact same, um, that exact same response, right? Oh, for sure. Oh, okay. Yeah, you want to ask me a silly question, I'm gonna give you a silly response. But you know, and and as we're talking about this sort of poking fun and making fun, I just want to stop and say, like, even back to, you know, my friend Rachel's classroom. It's such an important part of building our classroom culture to be able to be silly and to be able to be, you know, over the top or uh create the groans and tell the tell the dad math jokes and show the silly memes that don't make any sense because all of those things are, you know, those are ways for us to create relationship connections with our students. And that's just such a uh an important part of the teaching and learning process, you know. It's my I I just think it's so much easier to learn from somebody who I feel like is a real human. Um, and those are the things that kind of make us the real humans, you know. When I was teaching um pre-calculus years ago and we were studying um the right triangle trig on the right triangle trig functions, I used to tell this big elaborate story to sort of set my students up for a project they were gonna do. And we took um protractors and a straw and a piece of string and some washers, and we created this little tool that would allow us to spot an object at a certain height and then measure the angle of elevation. So then we could do a trig calculation to calculate the height of this object. So we were gonna do this project in uh in class, and I would set it up by giving this long elaborate story of walking my dog. And I'd be like, Yeah, it's walking my dog through the neighborhood, and you know, I would talk about the shadows and I would talk about the heights of things, and um, you know, share that I really needed to know how tall that lamppost was in my neighborhood. And luckily I had my handy clinometer in my pocket and you know, pulled it out and measured the angle of elevation. And I remember my students like kind of following along this story, and then there was a point kind of like in a dad joke where they realized I was just telling this elaborate story, and then you sort of got the eye rolls and the groans and the like, oh can't believe I fell over her story. She wasn't really walking her dog. This is all just a setup. Um, but you know, years later, I'd run into my students out in the grocery store at the mall, and they'd be like, Oh, remember when you told us about walking your dog and measuring the height of a flagpole with your protractor? For sure. You know, they remember those things. So I just I just think that's so important and underrated.

SPEAKER_04 13:23

And who's to say that you weren't actually out there with your protractor measuring the height of things uh and computing uh you know distances to flagpoles or heights of flagpoles for some reason?

SPEAKER_01 13:35

It wouldn't be unlike me to do, honestly. For sure.

SPEAKER_04 13:38

I mean, I carry around you know a calculator once in a while in the pocket to make sure that I've got I'm ready to go to make whatever graph or you know, I my my students I see, I don't think my students probably would have bought that from me because they would have already been going, yeah, Mr. Brown. They would have been like, yeah, we know. So we know, we know you. That's totally it. Well, I think there were some of these uh as we started kind of looking around and and thinking about these uh puns and memes and things that are out there on the internet and posts, sometimes these are also out there that that kind of make us think uh a little bit. Um, and or at least something that we could put in front of our students or even in front of like teachers that we may train or something like that uh to make them think uh just a little bit. And so I pulled up this one that uh was posted by a uh David Glasberg, and I I hope I said that uh appropriately uh on Twitter. And again, I don't know who owns the actual meme itself. I'm just saying where I found uh the meme itself. But uh it's got uh a picture uh of two solutions or two ways to factor uh this quadratic expression, 10x squared minus x minus three. Uh and those two expressions uh are being uh factored and and worked out um into um two different responses, or they at least appear to be two different responses. And it's got uh, I can't remember the lady's name from the office, but it says corporate needs you to find the differences between this picture and this picture. Uh and then when students start fighting over the who is doing it right, uh the response from the teacher is they're the same picture. Uh and sort of that aha moment, right? For students to go, oh yeah. Oh wow, okay, I see it. Um, because it took me a minute when I was looking at this, going, okay, all right, I follow it. I think we're good. And then I went, oh, oh, and I saw it was really nice. I thought this was kind of a fun, uh, kind of a fun picture uh to see and to uh have a you know have that kind of discussion about with your students, right?

SPEAKER_01 16:04

Yeah, I I really like this too. Like this is um, so it's Pam from the office.

SPEAKER_04 16:09

Okay, thank you.

SPEAKER_01 16:10

I uh yeah, I'm sure you just blanked on that for like and she's you know giving her typic uh a very typical Pam face. So I love this idea of like creating uh, you know, this would be a fun like opening activity at the beginning of a class period to get kids talking with one another and talking about math. And just by putting it into this, you know, silly sort of sarcastic, um, you know, meme, the meme kind of trend that is going around around right now to hook into the students, right? Like, oh okay, well, this is this is a this is just a meme. This isn't math class. Like, this is something I want to like, I want to make sense of this because memes are supposed to be funny. And you know, the other thing about memes is there's there's always like an inside joke kind of aspect to them, right? Like you have to have some insider information in order to find the funny part. Right. Um, and so being able to like put this in front of students who have the mathematical um understanding to be able to reason through and then understand, like, okay, what's the little like key piece of information that you would need to know for this to be funny? That if you don't have that information, it's just like, oh, what's that weird thing that doesn't make any sense to me?

SPEAKER_04 17:23

No, totally, totally. That's it.

SPEAKER_01 17:26

Like, I and I love that as a as a discussion prompt, right? Like this is uh it looks to me like a factor by grouping sort of strategy and showing that it doesn't matter which way you group, you're gonna end up with the same two factors that partially factored, these look totally different. They do. Um so, right? So starting that conversation and then and then I could even see turning that into like, okay, now write your own, whether it's write your own, you know, math problem that mirrors the top part of the meme, or whether you write your own different meme to go along with this math problem or something along those lines, like bringing in that creative aspect and the ability for students to take what's here and then generalize it to something further that you know connects to what we're doing in math class. And um, that way, this could not only be just a fun thing that we're doing for culture building and to engage and connected speaking in class, but it can actually be, you know, a mathematical activity or a formative assessment kind of thing.

SPEAKER_04 18:24

Totally, totally. And actually connected to that. Um, so a contributor on uh the My Nctm uh blog that's uh if you're an Nctm uh member, you can you have access to this and you get this uh the daily digest or whatever. Uh a little while ago, uh Lane Walker posted uh a really cool uh maybe question, uh comment around this this idea of um memorizing the quadratic formula and actually visualizing it. The the title of the of the digest uh strand is visualizing the quadratic formula, and I clicked on it thinking something completely different was going to be being discussed. Um, she had this really cool thing, and I was thinking about what a cool way to maybe even start your uh your question or your class period then and just having students actually read this in the way that it um could be uh read. And if you look closely, this is it's um it's a picture of the quadratic formula and it's got a little uh B uh in it, and the B. Yeah, like a bumblebee, and it's red. So negative B. X equals negative B, uh plus or minus. And then if you look carefully, you've got the radical sign, the the square root of, and then you have that same B. It's uh red, it's also square. Yeah, it's negative B. So it's B squared.

SPEAKER_01 20:01

Negative B.

SPEAKER_04 20:04

And then you've got uh minus, and it's got a picture of four aces.

SPEAKER_03 20:10

Like four cards, like playing cards. Yes, yes, four ac uh all over all over.

SPEAKER_01 20:20

I love how you can't even talk about this without laughing, but I mean it's the coolest thing ever, right?

SPEAKER_04 20:26

Uh all over two-way, which is it's got two arrows pointing in opposite, you know, uh opposing directions to like a two-way uh street sign or something. Um this is the best thing ever. I'm just I mean, having students read that um and try to like decipher that you could just post it up there even without telling them what they're talking about, and just have students figure out isn't there a game we used to do this uh all the time, that mad libs or something, not mad libs. I'm talking about Rebuses.

SPEAKER_03 20:58

There you go, revises, right?

SPEAKER_04 20:59

Where you have like the picture or the phrase or whatever, and you're supposed to figure out what it is based on on uh the stuff if you read it the way that it's supposed to uh to read. Like that's exactly what this is. And getting students actually do this, I think, is a great idea, a great fun way to kind of start your class and uh get things going. So thank you, Lane, for posting that one out there. There's great discussions actually uh were had about this um this idea of uh visualizing the quadratic and um things related to um to that. And this was such a cool thing. I just had to bring it up.

SPEAKER_01 21:34

Yeah, I really appreciated this too. And I think, you know, the the first instinct, or maybe uh maybe not the first instinct, but one instinct is to worry about, you know, the kind of get gimmicks and tricks that um you know sometimes are used to help kids remember something. And I think that you know, understanding, I know there's there there's publications, and you and I even had some conversation around, you know, caution around using. Gimmicks and trick tricks that aren't aren't founded in the math to help kids learn something. But I I as we were talking about this one, and like even as I saw this on the NCTM discussion boards, like I gotta really stop and think. I know what the quadratic formula is, right? So to look at this and go, okay, how does this, these two red B's and some playing cards and arrow pointing both ways represent the quadratic formula to like make some connection and do some sense making in my own head actually like helped solidify that understanding. Like I could see how once I actually know and understand the quadratic formula, having this image is just a way to help me recall it more quickly. And, you know, again, there's like a level of fun and a level of playfulness in there and a level of reasoning involved that, you know, this isn't how I would teach students the quadratic formula by any means, but you know, giving them something to sort of add to that, like, okay, how do you how do you get that recall back? Um, you know, I think that's that's pretty powerful. I think I've already told you the story, but I likened it to my own experience when I was a junior in high school and we had to memorize the preamble. We had to so the constitution, we had to like write, we had to write the entire preamble out on paper as a quiz. And, you know, all of us in class would joke that it was schoolhouse rock. Like there was a song, the preamble to a song. Um, I'll put that link in the show notes too, not at all math related, but I'm telling you, that's I know the preamble to this day because of that song because I could sing it, right? Um, now that doesn't mean I knew what the words meant. Like analyzing what the preamble is all about is a completely different skill. But being able to be able to say, like, here are the words of the preamble, and I could do that flawlessly to this day because of that song. And so these kinds of things that help us just bring that back to bear. Um, you know, remembering something as opposed to learning it's sort of to add that little editorial comment.

SPEAKER_04 24:03

No, it's totally worth it. And I think that's I think that's something that you know pe we do get uh really nervous about. And and certainly I'm I'm behind the the idea of you know, students need to have real understanding of what they're working with, and we need to be teaching them good solid mathematics. But at the same time, I mean frankly, uh we look at the standard algorithm, it it really is just efficiency. There's actually a lot of things that are being done in the standard algorithm when you start care you start putting digits in places that they don't really belong, and you have to really understand what it is you're actually writing over there, and you start borrowing what you know, borrowing and moving and I man, I unless you really know mathematics, uh that standard algorithm uh really is a trick, right? It it really is one of these things. So I I just I caution us from being afraid of those kind of uh tricks, if you will. And it and to comment on your song thing, I actually was cleaning out uh and looking for uh some something in my pants drawer the other day, and I found a note from a student. Uh, it's about 13 years old now. No, it's older that it's older than that. Anyway, uh and I found this note from a student, and uh it was it was when they found out that I was leaving the classroom and going uh to do something else, and she was a sophomore that I had had and was very disappointed and upset that I wasn't going to be uh back uh the next year to teach them in AP statistics. And um part of the comment, and a reason I bring this up is she wrote in there about where else are we gonna find a teacher who's willing to stand in front of the classroom and sing the quadratic formula song to Pop Goes the Weasel.

SPEAKER_03 25:59

We've all been there. Right, right, and you're like, ah man.

SPEAKER_04 26:03

Uh, but that's it. I mean, kids remember those kinds of things. Making your classroom something fun uh to do and to see and to be a part of um is worth it.

SPEAKER_01 26:22

Okay, I want to share another one of those that like just makes you kind of pause and think for a couple of minutes. And I've seen a couple of different images. This is the this is one that just came handy, but there are others that are better. Um, but it's a clock face, and instead of the numbers being, you know, 12, 1, 2, 3, all the way around, it's it's mathematical expressions that are equivalent to each of the numbers of the clock face. And this one that again we'll share in the show notes, I like this one especially because this ties back to a problem. Gosh, I can't remember where I saw this problem, whether it was MCTM or maybe it was in a book. I think it might have been part of Peter Lilliadal's um Building Thinking Classrooms book, where students use only the digit four to create uh an expression equivalent to all of the numbers from one to twenty or however you set it up. So this is a clock face where each of the numbers, 12, 1, 2, all the way around, are map expressions using only um fours.

SPEAKER_04 27:26

That's awesome. I want to see I want to see. So I don't even know if this is possible. All right, but I want to challenge students to do this with the numbers one through 12. Or well, I guess they would have to do it just the digits one through nine, but uh to use the digits one through nine for this. But wouldn't that be a fun problem to give them maybe one of these that like you had the with the clock like that and say, okay, yeah, now do this on your own and you create your own clock with a digit that you choose. Digits one through nine. Maybe they don't give them the opportunity to use one, uh, because maybe that's right too easy.

SPEAKER_01 28:12

Yeah, exactly. Well, one other so another image that I've seen of this clock is, and you could do this based on what math class you're teaching. Like I've seen it with, you know, integrals and complicated square roots, and you know, the you could do any sort of expression that would give the equivalent number. So using just the digits would be one really interesting challenge, but um, you know, you could also extend that to, you know, using only math from the unit we just taught, you know, make a clock face. Um, I thought that'd be kind of fun. So super interesting idea there.

SPEAKER_04 28:48

Totally. Well, I've got maybe one last one that I think uh I want to just share with you or to think about uh with you, and that is uh this uh image I came across um with Willy Wonka and kind of his you know great big grin, right? At the very uh end of the movie, he's kind of got that that great big uh grin in the movie. And it says uh it's kind of got across the top. It says math teachers be like, uh, and then at the bottom it says, tell me about how you're ever gonna use this math ever again after graduation. Um and this this meme, while in in uh you know, in one sense, you know, we as math teachers go, yeah, of course we relate that, right? I mean, of course we're going to be using mathematics outside of uh the math classroom. Uh and and students really do need to actually know this stuff uh beyond the scope of our course. Uh, but I think there's also something else to be thought about in this. And this is maybe the the other point, and it kind of coming full circle to some of the stuff that we talked about earlier, of this idea of we really need to make sure that uh we can actually have that smug face uh when we're doing this, that the mathematics that we're doing in our classroom, the applications that we're showing, uh that we do purposefully choose things and problems that matter such that uh we can have that that sort of smug uh look on our face and and talk to, you know, have that that thinking uh about. Yeah, tell me about how you're never gonna use this mathematics after you graduate.

SPEAKER_01 30:27

Right, never ever, just every day of your life.

SPEAKER_04 30:30

Because they're doing mathematics that actually matters in our classrooms and that we can show them uh those applications. I think that's uh that's maybe the last one that I uh wanted to bring up or maybe showcase uh for us here uh today.

SPEAKER_01 30:45

Yeah, I love that. Well, this has been a lot of fun, Curtis. And I think um I I hope our users, you know, our listeners rather, you know, I know some people I certainly listen to a lot of my podcasts when I'm taking a walk or I'm in the car. So hopefully everybody will take a minute to dig into the show notes a little bit, check out the links where you can see some of the images that we've talked about today. Um, and then we would also love uh if you would, you know, send us your favorite math kind of gifts or memes or jokes or um whatever makes you laugh and and helps you build connections with your students. So hey, thanks a lot. It was uh it was really fun to share some of these with you. And I've got some uh some uh nice things to add to my bulletin board.

SPEAKER_00 31:30

Well, that's it for this time. Be sure to check the show notes for the resources we mentioned and others you might want to explore. We would love to hear your feedback and your suggestions for future topics. And if you're enjoying learning with us, consider leaving a review to help others find us and share the podcast with a fellow math educator. See you next time.