Here’s my latest addiction. It’s a game called Planarity. Rearrange the blue vertices so that none of the edges overlap.

So far, I’ve made it to the 16th level with a score of 6611. Take a screenshot of your best score and post it in the comments.

This past Friday, my school had an inservice day for the teachers. I was responsible for a small portion of the day. It was my task to provide a demonstration of the Four Corners differentiated instruction strategy to the rest of the faculty. I decided the best way to accomplish that was to actually go through the activity instead of just telling my colleagues about it. So of course, I based the activity on a mathematical statement. Usually, any discussion of mathematics with the faculty in general is met by moans, groans, and eye-rolling. This time, I was surprised. But I’ll get to that in a minute.Four Corners works like this:

1. Teacher writes a debateable or controversial statement on the board.
2. Students move to the corner of the room where the sign is posted that most closely represents their opinion on the statement.
3. Discussion, questions, and debate are then allowed between the four groups.
4. Next, students are allowed to switch to another corner if they changed their opinion.
5. Students are invited to explain what caused any change of opinion.

The statement I posed to the faculty was this:

There are more integers total (… -3, -2, -1, 0, 1, 2, 3, …) than there are decimal numbers just between 0 and 1.

The four statements that I posted in the four corners were:

I was quite surprised by the amount of discussion that my statement generated. It was very interesting to see how “non-math” people think about mathematics in a purely theoretical setting. The faculty really “dug” the discussion and many of them switched corners as thoughts and arguements were shared.

Ultimately, they ended up fairly evenly divided amongst the four corners. By the end of the activity, they were begging me to tell them which response was actually the correct one (I had told them that one and only one of the responses was indeed correct). I eventually did tell them. But in this post, I’ll leave it to one (or more) of my readers to leave a comment as to which response should be chosen to the above statement.

As the first quarter grading period will end this Friday, students are suddenly very interested in their grades. It’s so curious how they will wait until the last week of the grading period to ask forgiveness for the previous 8 weeks of sins. It usually sounds something like this: “Mr. B, is there anything I can do to bring up my grade?” or “Mr. B, do you have any extra credit I can do?” or “Mr. B, I really need to get a C in this class. Can I clean your board or your desks for some extra credit?”

I sure would like to get my hands on the scoundrel who invented “extra” credit.  It’s almost like extra credit is a religion that students in which students blindy place their faith — they hope that it will save them from judgement for their sins.  I just tell my students, “Sorry, you should put forth a consistent effort throughout the entire course.  Then this wouldn’t be an issue.”