Watching TV is difficult

I recently saw Sky Sports for the first time.  It was mesmerising!  This appeared to be a general sports programme (there wasn’t actually a match taking place at the time), and I was just overwhelmed by the sheer amount of information that was being provided.  Here is a picture:

 

I didn’t understand how to make use of it.

First let’s look at what is provided:

1]  The time and date.  This was fine - it was always there and so I could ignore it unless I particularly needed to know either of these.

2]  League tables.  It is currently showing the Darts Premier League rankings, then moved on to Basketball and had previously shown Rugby, Football, etc.  This appeared to be on a cycle.

3]  An advert for something Sky-related, which zoomed around and changed when the league tables updated.

4]  ‘Breaking News’ - a couple of news headlines that cycled round on a tickertape.

5]  Slightly more detailed news stories about particular sports.  There were several stories about each sport or competition.

6]  A list showing which news stories were due to appear next.

And then, in the main part of the screen there were presenters talking about a news story and providing analysis.

I initially tried to take all of it in.  It was impossible to read everything all at once.  The league tables changed fairly frequently so I couldn’t read it all in time, the news stories were fine unless I wanted to focus on a different element on the screen in which case I missed one of those and while the tickertape didn’t seem to update very often my eye was still drawn to it because it moved.

After a while I changed tack and focused just on a single thing.  I found that there are only so many league tables I can cope with!  Most of them were completely irrelevant to me (darts, basketball) but then those in which I did have an interest zoomed past before I could read them in full (Prem).

Later I tried glancing up every now and then.  I caught the odd news story, the odd bit of tickertape and the occasional league table.

Which was most satisfying?  The final version, where I glanced up occasionally and picked up the odd bit of information.  But this was also rather unsatisfactory because it meant I didn’t actually have control over what I was finding out about, and the information I was gaining was really rather scattered.

Conclusions

There are several possible conclusions that could be drawn from this.

1] Maybe I am too used to being able to choose my own information rather than being fed what someone else has programmed.

2] Perhaps this is designed just to give the impression that it is telling us lots of things, whereas in reality there is little of interest going on and no-one is taking any of it in anyway.

3] Or maybe I am too unfamiliar with this style of TV to know how to watch it effectively.  

The last of these possibilities bothers me a little.  If I can't understand and take in information presented in this way because it is unfamiliar to me, how will people who are used to this style of delivery of information cope in the classroom?  Will they have a similar difficulty?  If so, how should I try to deal with this?

Does anyone else find this difficult to watch, or is it just me?

Blank Books

In their first lesson of term I issued my Yr 10 class with blank exercise books.  Not just empty ones, but ones with blank pages.  There was consternation!

“Where are the squares?”  they asked. 

I explained that we would be trying this out, that many people find squares hard to write on and that we would review it at the end of the year, but that when they finished their exercise book they would be able to request either a blank or a squared replacement as they wanted.

Most seemed happy with this.  A few people resolved to “write very big” so they would finish the book quickly.  A couple of girls spent the rest of that lesson carefully measuring and ruling out squares to write on!

Things settled down fairly quickly and it has been interesting that three-quarters of the class have requested blank replacement books.  One boy who had a squared book second has finished that already and wanted to return to the blank version.  One of the most vocally anti-blank girls admitted that she now likes having blank pages: “I didn’t like it to start with but now I have got used to it I do.”

So why make the change?

Since time immemorial the maths dept has used books with squares of side ½ cm.  Some pupils can make these work for them, but many are unable to write on legibly on the lines so they scrawl across the page.  While it is sometimes useful to have squares available, it is also sometimes useful to have isometric grids … and we issue these on paper that the pupils stick into their books, so doing the same with squares seems reasonable.

I tried using books with cm squares, particularly for pupils with large handwriting.  Every pupil described them as ‘baby books’ because they stopped using them in KS1.  It seems that “the squares get smaller as the child gets older” is ingrained and an important rite of passage for the pupils.

I don’t like the half-cm-sided squares and using 0.7cm or cm squares is considered ‘babyish’ by pupils, so blank books seemed like a useful alternative.  As a side issue, GCSE exam papers generally have blank spaces for answers.

It is also quite nice to question assumptions that so many people have.  Pupils from different classes, other teachers, and visitors to the lesson are always very surprised to see blank books being used for maths. 

I wonder if there are other things I do just because “we do it that way” but which I really ought to reconsider?

Roughly Pi Day

I am getting my grump in early so I can batten down the hatches, pull my scarf up around my neck and grit my teeth when everyone else gets very excited around the middle of March about ‘Pi Day’.  For anyone who is new to this, ‘Pi Day’ is celebrated on 14^th March, written in England as 14/3, or 14.3.13 or 14/3/13 if you want to include the year too.

In the USA the month and day are transposed, so it would be 3.14.13, which looks rather bizarre to me, although it is only ambiguous when the day of the month is 12 or below.  Is 4/5/13 the fourth of May (UK) or the fifth of April (USA)?  Incidentally, in the UK we use 9/11 to refer to the attacks because the name comes from the USA.  The London terrorist bombings in the summer of 2006 are referred to as 7/7, but this is the same in both systems.

[As it happens both systems are unhelpful.  It would seem to make far more sense to put the year, followed by the month and then the day, not least because when these are sorted numerically they appear in order.  Today would therefore be 20130303 which comes before 20130304, etc.  This is the way I label computer files that need dates.  xkcd agrees with me.]

 14^th March, in the US system, is 3.14, which is the start of the decimal approximation of pi, 3.1415926 … etc.  So this gets used as Pi Day. 

I have no problem with a day where everyone talks lots about pi and how extraordinary and interesting pi is.  There are lots of exciting things to talk about at different levels, and the idea of a shared mathematical experience across different classes in school is a good one.

So what’s the problem?   Pi is not 3.14

I would much prefer “Pi approximation day”.  But that has already been taken for 22/7 (in the UK system), because the fraction 22/7 is a commonly used approximation for pi. 

Now, I am not sure that 22/7 is used much nowadays because calculators are ubiquitous, so there isn’t much need (I am sure I can recall old exam papers that had circles with radius a multiple of 7 to make the pre-calculator calculations easier).  But the particularly strange thing here is that 22/7 is actually a better approximation (in the sense of having a smaller error) than 3.14 is!  [But  22^nd July is often not during school term time, so it isn’t a helpful maths day anyway.]

I will swim against the tide and refer to 14^th March as “Roughly Pi day” and an activity I will do with pupils is to look at the percentage errors in different approximations to pi, from 22/7 to 3.14 to 333/106 to 355/113.

A final thought: the day following the 14^th is the Ides of March.  Down with dictators and those who fail to make it clear they have rounded pi!