I recently binged some episodes of Netflix’s The Crown. If you haven’t watched, it’s a fantastic show, and I have learned extensively about British history and its monarchy. What is curious about this is that I have never had an interest in either of these topics. How did The Crown not only engage me with hours of my time but also inspire digital rabbit holes on the guy who painted Winston Churchill’s portrait or the stray details of Captain Peter Wooldridge Townsend? I want to relate this to secondary mathematics. Many teachers go into teaching math because they enjoy it and soon realize that HS mathematics is boring, inapplicable, and useless after college (sounds kind of like the history of the British sovereign to 15-year-old me).
While there are dozens of lessons around the impressive design of world-class shows, like the tremendous work by a stellar cast, I want to examine the thematic story-telling model of The Crown series. The episodes are driven by stories, empathy, and characters. Episodes can take place years or days apart and have different directors. Prominent characters will be heavily involved for an episode or two and then disappear. Each episode deliberately does a deep dive into an historical event and the characters connected to it. As a viewer myself, I am consistently drawn into these events, research them on my own, and spend a strange amount of time learning about people and stories in which I previously had no interest.
NOW, is there creative license involved? Absolutely, but I love digging into the minutiae of details that the creators adapted or timelines twisted to complete an episode’s arc. Notice… I am still learning what really happened here. The show is accomplishing its goal of exceptional production quality and I am learning a lot about discrete stories from the British monarchy. That initial engagement has resulted in some surprisingly deep learning, conversations, and often live-texting to others who watch the show. Okay, let’s relate this back to secondary mathematics (Algebra 1 up through Calculus).
In the traditional HS math class you have the History channel version of The Crown. To quote the Duke of Edinburgh in S.3, “it’s not a sermon, it’s a general anesthetic”. Narrated by (albeit, brilliant) scholars and featuring black and white photos slowly zooming in-and-out, this show would be the equivalent of reading a textbook. Poorly narrated events, insignificant details flooding each page, little color, and likely resulting in most students hating the course – not to mention confusion and general anger (or high levels of anxiety) regarding the subject. However, tweaking the pedagogy helps- using inquiry-based learning and attempting pseudo-projects in class- but only in the same way that shows like to have live-action shorts to recreate historical events which come off as corny and unauthentic. What we need is real change to the curriculum and overall narrative of the course.
In my (high school) quantitative reasoning course, we are starting to learn about cryptocurrency, blockchain technology, the stock market, and even current events like the domestic terror episode at the US capitol last week and how these things impact the economy and financial networks. After that, we might move into big data or numbers behind the vaccine rollout across the globe. Last semester, students created data visualizations on climate change, unexpected death rates by animals (spoiler: mosquitoes massively outperform sharks), and Trump’s taxes. It is a thematic course, driven by what is happening in the world and what will let students connect to stories, people, passions, and empathy. Will these topics help them on the SAT/ACT? Nope. But students will find themselves looking up obscure mathematical phenomena on Numberphile after class has ended.
Learning V. School 