Causality vs Causation and an Intro to Graphing

The second spiral was a short introduction to relations.  I started off with the concept of a rate, and created my own version of the "pumping gas" problem from Mr. Orr's "tap into teen minds". 

One of the best things that Mr. Dan Meyer stated about this was how the video can be used as a 'hook'.  Boy, did I underestimate the power of this hook.  Combine this hook with open ended questions, and Dan Meyer was absolutely correct - all sorts of learners participated, even the weaker math students.

The video even out the playing field and it was magical to have such engagement in an applied classroom.  In all of my eight years of teaching (I know, I'm young), I have never, ever seen this.

Another thing that has me pleasantly surprised - were the questions being asked.

"What car is it?"
"How many litres can your car hold?"
"How many litres did you put in?"
"How big is your car?"


"How much did you pay?"


It is so intriguing as some of these questions did not come to my mind, yet each of them are indeed connected to math.  In many ways, my converging mindset could only think of the one question I really wanted (ie:  what is the price of gas per litre?)  I must work on my divergent thinking.

After a day of rates, we went on to the topic of scatterplots.  Now understanding the importance of a hook, I started the students off with a 30 second paragraph of Tyler Vigen's graphs of spurious correlations

The causality vs correlation issue is often a huge source of consternation for those who frequent the forums online, and I just wanted to introduce this common pitfall. 

Hence, my Friday assessment of scatterplots and rates was chicken and crude oil related, much to the delight of some of my students.  Or chagrin.  I'm still learning to read some of them one month through.

On a side note, a few of my students were trying to force a connection in this above relationship depicted by the line graph to make sense and ventured a hypothesis thinking that the chicken was being cooked in the crude oil. 

My mind is still blown that I have such a high engagement level. 

I'm proud of the students.  Let's see how long we can keep this up.

Look ahead:  I'm spiraling back to the Pythagorean theorem by starting off week 4 with  perimeter of composite shapes.  Now that we've completed an initial assessment and a reassessment of week 1, I know exactly who to target tomorrow for individual help.  This is an incredible advantage of the spiral curriculum.