Save Big Money at Menards

Do you know the Menards jingle? Two options:

  1. What?
  2. Of course I do!

In other words, you’re either from the Chicago area or you’re not. I am, and as we’ve been visiting my parents this week I’ve had many chances to revisit that particular aspect of my childhood.

More importantly, though: here are a few of the CDs and tapes that are hanging around in my childhood bedroom.

Bridges to Babylon, The Rolling Stones – I don’t know how old I was, it could have been anywhere from 8 to 12 years old, so let’s say that I was 10. I told my mom that I wanted to get a CD, so she drove me to the local Blockbusters — one of those Blockbusters that carried music. She trotted me in front of some salesperson who I was totally intimidated by. Then the Blockbusters guy asked, “So, what sort of music do you like?”

How didn’t I understand that I would need to prepare an answer to that question? I had no plan. None. I thought that I would walk into that store, ask for Music, and then be granted Music.

“Uhh…I like music where you can hear the words,” is what I said, which is stupid because there is lots of good music where you can’t hear the words, and in fact some of the best music exists in that sweet spot where you are 60% sure of what the singer is saying.

(Until a week ago, I definitely thought the Magic School Bus theme had a line that went like this: raft a river of blood!)

So Blockbusters guy handed me two CDs, and we bought them both. The first was The Rolling Stones’ Bridges to Babylon.

The second was freaking the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, which means that Blockbuster guy saw this little kid asking for music where you can hear the words and decided that he either wanted (a) one of the best albums from the best band of all time or (b) an irrelevant late-period album from one of the best bands of all time. What was that thinking? I wish I could talk to that guy, but I can’t because that Blockbusters isn’t there any more, so that guy probably had to get a new job.

Everclear, So Much For the Afterglow

This is from a few years later, and I was definitely getting closer to finding my musical tastes. I have no idea where I would have heard of Everclear, though my main sources of access to music were MTV, VH1 or the radio. Actually I have vague memories of the “Father of Mine” video on VH1, so that’s probably where this came from.

I remember spending whatever pre-teen money I had on the CD, bringing it home and putting it in the boombox. At first I really liked it. But after a few tracks (yeah) I realized (yeah) that every song (yeah) eventually turns into a chorus of yeahs (ye-ah). To the record with only one pop idea!

Various Artists, Wild Wild West Soundtrack

I swear, I can still do it! Let’s see how far I get…

Wild Wild West! Jim West! Desparado! (something), no you don’t want na-doe(?)…

that wasn’t nearly as much as I thought I could do. Damn.

This CD was huge when I was at summer camp, which I think was when I was going into 8th Grade. I remember this one was on heavy rotation on our bunk stereo.

And it’s not bad, honestly. BLACKstreet, Dr. Dre and Eminem, Enrique Iglesias, let the rhythm take you over. 95% of the time when a bunch of 8th Graders get into a group they make worse decisions than any single individual would, but I’d have to say that this is the exception. Ridiculous as it is, this was my route into rap/R&B.

David Gray, A Century Ends, Lost Songs, White Ladder, A New Day at Midnight

My David Gray fandom as a teen is…not flattering. Here’s how it happened: starting around 8th Grade I started playing music with friends, i.e. in bands. I played keyboard/piano — at first a dinky one, and then a proper instrument. And this was terrific — I met a lot of people who liked music and played music with them.

This, though, I don’t know. Here’s what I’ve found: just because you are excellent at playing an instrument does not mean you have good taste in music. In fact, some of the most insufferable listeners of music I know are musicians because they’ll like a band that makes “interesting” but terrible music.

Anyway, David Gray is not “interesting” in any significant way, though he was recommended to me by a guitar player friend with terrible taste. (At least he did as a kid. Maybe he is reformed from his jammy, hippie ways.)

The only thing embarrassing about liking David Gray as much as I did was that, for a few years, I was a child whose favorite artist was charting only on Adult Contemporary. But, look, the guy has some good songs.

Most importantly, though, David Gray was probably the first artist who I liked partly because I knew his story. His first few records underperformed commercially (presumably critically also given the songs he wrote). He then, as a sort of last ditch effort, married his extremely acoustic balladeer sound with some simple synthy things and had a surprise hit (“Please Forgive Me”). The video involved a piano crashing, I think. Then he released Lost Songs, which gave his new fans a chance to hear all of his unpopular music — I dug it.

I remember an extremely embarrassing conversation with my father, on our way to a hockey game. Usually on our way to my hockey games we listened to one of the following dad-approved artists: Billy Joel, Bruce Springsteen, Meatloaf, Rod Stewart, Bob Dylan.

(All first-round inductees to the Dad Rock Hall of Fame, and to my heart. Except for Rod Stewart. Forget that guy.)

Anyway, the embarrassing thing I said was “You know Bob Dylan sort of sounds like David Gray.” And my dad sort of huffed and said, “No, that guy sounds like Dylan.”

Which is mostly embarrassing because, no? They don’t? The only thing they have in common vocally is that it’s sometimes hard to make out the words that they’re singing. As established, this was a major concern of mine as a young listener. Presumably that’s what I was getting on.

Matchbox Twenty, Mad Season

Do you remember at big music stores (which is what I was mostly frequenting) they had those CDs with headphones dangling and you could preview a CD but only while standing next to a pole that was also a CD player?

I do. I bought this at Barnes and Noble after hearing “Bent” on VH1.

Papa Roach, Infest [non-explicit version]

Man, so this is precisely the kind of kid I was. I was watching MTV and I saw the video for “Last Resort,” the hit single from Papa Roach about suicide. Now, I didn’t care about the lyrics — surprise, Blockbusters guy! — and I just knew that I didn’t have riffs like that in my life yet. Plus, it’s catchy, so sue me.

The pickle I was in was this: there is a lot of cursing on this album, and that was a no-no in my parents’ home. So…the intensely non-cool compromise was to order the non-explicit version from the internet, maybe the first purchase I ever made from the internet, come to think of it.

What’s sort of funny is they reword the lyrics insert so that there are no curses there either. Which means the lyrics page reads like this:

Cut my life into pieces / this is my last resort

Suffocation, no breathing / don’t give a (bleeped) if I leave my arm bleeding

This was the way my childhood was. I did all these things that should have been cool, and they even sort of sound cool if we speak in general terms. Once we get into the details, the details are never cool.

So for instance it’s true, I did play in bands all through high school, and we even got gigs. Cool!, you say. But then, ruining a perfectly good thing, I go on: yeah, we were a Jewish band, mostly playing on Purim or Channukah, mostly dancing music for classmates and our rabbis. We played a bar mitzvah once. We were a pretty big deal.

And also I played keyboards, the single un-coolest instrument you can play in a band. With conventional rock instruments, here is the ranking:

  1. Guitar
  2. Drums
  3. Vocals (controversial ranking, but this is my experience)
  4. Bass
  5. Saxophone
  6. Are there any other instruments in the band?
  7. Piano keyboard

The White Stripes, Get Behind Me Satan

Here is where I start to get my act together.

I remember where I was when I first heard “Seven Nation Army,” which is not on this album (this is Jack White’s piano album, which I liked for obvious reasons). I first heard it in the dorms at my yeshiva high school (it had a dorm for the dormers) and I was with my friend Shmuel in Ariel’s room. Ariel wasn’t there, but he had a radio.

The radio was on and we heard Meg White’s drums come in. Boom boom boom boom. Steady, icky thumping, one after the other, relentless.

I just want to be clear: I never danced, but I swear to it — we were dancing around Ariel’s room. In the scene in my memory, we were just drumming on things, yes, yes! This is the stuff. Mainline it, please.

Goodbye, Everclear. So much for the afterglow.

***

And much more. That’s what I called music. This is volume 1. There is much more.

Some choice quotes from Jeff Tweedy’s memoir

I think I want to use this blog to share more quotes from things that I’m reading. Right now that’s Jeff Tweedy’s very funny and touching memoir Let’s Go (So We Can Get Back).

I thought this was perceptive about the changing function of music reviews:

I will say that today, reviews aren’t quite the same as they were back in the early ages of rock journalism. Reviews back then devoted way more ink to trying to describe what music sounded like. That was their main purpose. It’s why people read them, because it was the only way to decide if you wanted to spend your money on a particular record.

I’m already looking forward to explaining those weird CD sampling stations that they used to have at Barnes & Noble to my kids.

From rehab:

I’d sit in group sessions and listen to other patients talk about their lives, and what they’d endured was beyond anything I could imagine … One guy told us about seeing his father murder his mother when he was nine and that he had his first taste of alcohol that night because his father forced him to drink whiskey, thinking it would make him forget what he’d seen. Hearing a story like that made me ashamed of how little I had had to survive and how much pain I’d derived from so much less actual trauma. What was I gonna say when the group got to me? “Um … I cry a lot. I get scared sometimes. I have headaches, and it makes it hard to make music.” That was the worst of it. I was out of my league.

One time, after a group session, a few of us were in the smoking room and I confided to them, “I feel like I shouldn’t even open my mouth. I don’t want anyone to get the idea that I think my situation compares.”

“Listen to me, motherfucker, listen.” Getting right up in my face. “Mine ain’t about yours. And yours ain’t about mine. We all suffer the same. You don’t get to decide what hurts you. You just hurt. Let me say my shit, and you say your shit, and I’ll be there for you. Okay?”

Pain is pain is pain is pain. To elevate someone else’s pain is ultimately to make it strange — to alienate that other person from you.

The Real Satisfaction of Mathematics

“In short, mathematics only exists in a living community of mathematicians that spreads understanding and breaths life into ideas both old and new. The real satisfaction from mathematics is in learning from others and sharing with others.”

I return often to this quote from Bill Thurston. Here’s what I’m getting out of it today: the mathematical researcher is just looking for something new to share with others, a distinctive piece of the mathematical universe that they can teach the world. The search is for something new, but only because new ideas are something worth sharing.

Mathematical teachers, professionally speaking, are chasing the same goal via the opposite strategy. We don’t bother seek new mathematics, which after all is only one way among many to find something worth sharing. But what we do aim to share, we aim to share more widely than any researcher could.

I wonder whether there’s an alternate history of mathematics out there. Rather than focusing on those who were mathematically innovative, it would be a history of learners and sharers of mathematics par excellence. Would that be the same history? I don’t think it would.

Why should mindset and purpose interventions work equally well?

Screenshot 2018-06-06 at 10.08.41 PM

This figure is from a 2015 paper, Mind-Set Interventions Are a Scalable Treatment for Academic Underachievement, and it comes out of the PERTS group, which generally does great work (as far as I as an outsider can tell).

There’s something fascinating about this study. I think, very quietly, their work represents a conceptual shift in research on mindset. The move is away from mindset and toward interventions as the main object of study.

I have Carol Dweck’s Mindset book, and it’s pretty clear that for her mindset is supposed to be a uniquely powerful force in our motivational psychology. It is the key. There really are two types of people: people who view intelligence as fixed or malleable, and this is a major factor in your motivation and subsequent success in a variety of arenas.

But check out this 2015 paper and check out that figure — there are two interventions that they tested, and only one of them has anything to do with mindset. First, the typical implicit theory of intelligence intervention:

Growth-mind-set interventions convey that intelligence can grow when students work hard on challenging tasks—and thus that struggle is an opportunity for growth, not a sign that a student is incapable of learning.

But then there’s the sense of purpose intervention which has nothing to do with the malleability of anything:

Sense-of-purpose interventions encourage students to reflect on how working hard and learning in school can help them accomplish meaningful goals beyond the self, such as contributing to their community or being examples for other people.

The theory that supports this intervention is entirely unrelated to growth mindset theory. It takes no position on whether someone thinks of human attributes as essentially fixed or malleable. If you thought that growth mindset was a hugely impactful factor that governs motivation, there’s no reason at all why you’d think a sense of purpose intervention works.

(There’s a reeaaaal cool move when the authors call both of these “academic mindset interventions” in that paper.)

And the results of this study found that both of these types of interventions worked about as well as each other. And their benefits didn’t seem to combine, which is also interesting, because why wouldn’t they, if they’re separate motivational concerns?

One possibility: people tend to be demotivated because of theory of intelligence or because of absence of purpose, but not by both. Another possibility is that demotivated people tend to be equally motivated by either intervention.

(I imagine there’s a lot of ways to sort this out with the data they’ve already collected. Which intervention works better for students assessed as having a fixed mindset?)

The second possibility — that both interventions work equally well for at-risk students — would represent a really interesting possibility, which is that the theory behind the mindset intervention doesn’t matter a ton. What if all this under the hood theory doesn’t matter a great deal? What if motivational interventions and their design is the thing worth studying, and the basic theory underlying them doesn’t matter a great deal?

If it’s true, this would make a great deal of sense to me. Dweck’s mindset theory would have not predicted that you could get the same results with an intervention like sense of purpose that uses an entirely different mechanism. (People who underwent the purpose intervention didn’t have changed beliefs about intelligence — they checked.) Mindset was supposed to be the big thing. The fact that it’s being considered as part of a menu of motivational interventions along with purpose seems significant. We’ve already moved most of the way away from seeing it as a uniquely powerful theory for explaining motivation.

And maybe the authors are saying as much in their paper. After all, it seems that now a mindset researcher doesn’t study “mindsets” at all but “mindset interventions,” which is a totally different thing.

I eagerly await something that will help clarify things. Speaking of, does anybody have a copy of this preprint? I wish I’d held on to it before it was taken down. (Update: oh, I think this is it. If so seems like sense of purpose interventions weren’t in play.)

Some questions about the problem of teachers leaving the classroom

Is it actually a problem for kids? Would schools be more effective places if more teachers on the margins of leaving were to stay in the classroom? How do we know? Is there a correlation between ambitious and teaching skill? What is the correlation?

Do master teacher programs improve learning for a district?

How much of the stress in education about people leaving the classroom could be explained by how uniquely meaningful working with children is? After all, going into management involves a change at work across professions. (Sales managers don’t go on sales calls; you leave the regular police work to get a desk job; you still do rounds occasionally but mostly you don’t see patients, etc.) How much of the problem is that there is a huge emotional gap between teaching and higher-paying work that keeps teachers in the classroom, marginally?

Would people be more effective at their administrative jobs if they were partly in the classroom? Would they be more influential?

William Carlos Williams was a doctor by day, poet by night. No one suggests that there should be more doctor/poet jobs. How do we decide what sorts of jobs their ought to be?

I find this so confusing. What questions do you have? Comments are open.

Some of my assumptions for communicating about teaching

These all might be wrong, but I think some of them are worth exposing. Maybe you’ll help me see how I’m wrong?

1. When have something I want to say about teaching or learning, there is a temptation to coin a new word that identifies a new concept. I try to avoid this temptation.

Suppose, for example, that I get up at a conference and say “math should be sticky.” There are some risks. First, there’s the risk someone will spend a lot of time puzzling over what I mean by “sticky,” remember the phrase, and have no idea what I meant by it in context. (This happens often — people remember memorable tags but struggle to articulate what they mean.) Probably then I’ll start hearing people say that I believe that you should teach in such-and-such a way because it’s “sticky” when that’s not what I meant. There’s also a risk that my word will have connotations that I didn’t expect. (Oh, you think “sticky” is gross and bad? Oops.)

So as a rule — a writing rule, a speaking rule — I try very hard to only use words that I think everybody pretty much uses in the same way.

This is not easy, because (I associate this thought with Ilana Horn) the meanings people assign to seemingly clear words like “discover” in teaching varies a great deal. I might say “worksheet” and you might imagine “evil packet that kids work on in silence and struggle” and I imagine “a bunch of problems on a page that hit the sweet spot for kids, who are asking questions and talking together about math.”

So it’s not easy, but I do try. It helps to keep an eye out for words (like “worksheet”) that could be misunderstood, and to replace those with context and sentences that make it clearer what’s happening and what I’m imagining.

2. I try to avoid advocating for practices unconditionally. What I mean is that I never say “we should do this in class more!” without suggesting when it might be useful to do that in class. I’m thinking about this right now with worked examples. I think example-based learning is great and cool and fun, but I would never give a talk (I think) calling for greater use of examples in teaching. Instead, though, I would give a talk describing situations that especially call for worked-examples and teaching people how examples can be useful in that context. (Here are two: “examples as feedback” and “examples as models for really complex thinking.”)

Likewise, I try never to talk in general about teaching, or about teaching math in general. I try to stay conditional.

***

These two things, I think, make communication about teaching easier. As a consequence, I think it ensures that nobody thinks that I mean something I don’t mean, and nobody thinks that I have solutions to many of their teaching problems, or a message that would revolutionize math teaching.

And, as a further result of that, what I have to say is less broadly meaningful, polarizing and also less popular. That’s the tradeoff, I think. Clarity for popularity.

Addendum: I have nobody in particular in mind with this post, but it was inspired by a lot of the tweets I saw from the NCTM conference. I’ll say that the “unconditional” thing was inspired by advocacy for a lot of the thinking prompts that don’t call for precise answers — numberless word problems, goal-free problems, estimation problems, notice/wonder, etc.

These are all incredibly useful, but (I think) far more useful when a topic is new to a student. So I think the general direction is that these more open prompts are great ways in, but you sort of want to call for more and more precision in your prompts as the learning progresses.

I was once talking to a friend who felt burned by Estimation180. Why, I asked. Well, she was trying to use it every day to improve her students’ number sense, but it hadn’t worked. She was disillusioned.

I’m not disillusioned. I know that Estimation180 tasks are useful in some situations and less useful in others. I have some thoughts about where and when they’re useful in my teaching. I try to stick to talking about that when I’m talking about teaching and estimation.

Would you like to read together at The Old Reader?

Aside

Do you miss Google Reader?

Way back when Google Reader closed up shop, my roommate and I decided to migrate ourselves over to The Old Reader. Per the title, it’s a near-clone of Google’s late RSS aggregation tool.

Here are things I love about it:

  • It’s simple.
  • Unlike the rest of the internet, it’s not built around images. It’s built around text.
  • Sharing and commenting is exactly as it was with Google Reader.

My (now former) roommate and I have been continuously using The Old Reader to share and discuss stuff we see on the internet for the past however many years. What I’ve lost, however, is the posse of friends with other interests whose enthusiasms I no longer have access to. They aren’t on The Old Reader; they’re on Facebook, Twitter, elsewhere.

Twitter is, like, I hope I don’t say the wrong thing. The Old Reader is, like, let’s think about this together and we both might be wrong. Very much in the spirit of “rough draft thinking.”

Would you like to join? If so, sign up for The Old Reader (free, but I pay for unlimited subscriptions), and we’ll follow each other and read together.