In 2013, Dan Meyer released a video which edited together all of the negative comments about math made in Hollywood movies. It was called Hollywood Hates Math. Recently, two television shows premiered that center their stories around the professional lives of teachers.

Here are a couple of clips:

Art class in Teachers on TV Land

Spanish, History, and Gym classes in Those Who Can’t on TruTV

Besides filling the stereotypical gender roles of elementary and high school teachers, these scenes provide a litany of examples where teachers are portrayed more as “babysitters” than professionals.

Finally, here’s a bonus clip from a show you may already be familiar with, Girl Meets World. I’ll leave you with this question, what was the lesson plan?

Every classroom is a bustling ecosystem of voices, ideas, and inside jokes. Every member of the classroom, teachers and students, is working together to form a cohesive learning environment. Each classroom is different based on the unique members that make up its ecosystem.

The broad range of experiences and perspectives brought to school by culturally, linguistically, and ethnically diverse students offer a powerful resource for everyone to learn more—in different ways, in new environments, and with different types of people. Every single person in this enormously diverse and ever-changing system has the power to serve as an invaluable resource for all others—students, teachers, and the community as a whole. Rather than constituting a problem for students and educators, the growing diversity in U.S. classrooms necessitates and encourages the development and use of diverse teaching strategies designed to respond to each student as an individual (Saravia-Shore, 2008).

The diversity of the classroom is at the epicenter of the learning environment. Diversity, however, can come to mean a variety of things.

Recently, I have been reading about the concept of Neurodiversity. Essentially, neurodiversity is based on the idea that brain diversity is similar to cultural diversity and the diversity of ecosystems.

We don’t pathologize a calla lily by saying that it has a “petal deficit disorder.” We simply appreciate its unique beauty…Similarly, we ought not to pathologize children who have different kinds of brains and different ways of thinking and learning (Armstrong, 2012).

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On Wednesday I posted a 3-act task that I planned to use in my class the next day.

Here’s how it went…

Act 1 asked students to watch a video and record what they noticed and what they wondered. As a usual modification for my students I had them make a T-chart graphic organizer in their math notebooks to record their observations. We watched the 1 minute video 4 times, twice for noticing and twice for wondering.

One student’s math notebook

Students noticed:

• The plastic bag was being filled
• There were some cheerios
• There were some chex
• There were some M&Ms
• There was 1 raisin

Students wondered:

• How many trail mix pieces altogether?
• Why didn’t I add more cereal?
• Why the whole bag on M&Ms was being put in the trial mix?
• Why only 1 raisin?
• How many cheerios, chex, and M&Ms?

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