Leaders in Mathematical Thinking Sarah Greenwald - Pop Culture in the Classroom

>> So in the Futurama universe, there's a character who the series is based around. And he leaps forward a thousand years. He's in suspended animation, and then wakes up a thousand years later. So one example of an engaging moment is when he goes to his bank, which is still in existence, and tries to find out what his bank balance is. And so the bank teller says to him, "Oh, 93 cents, but you have had an interest of 2.25 percent for a thousand years." So I asked my student, "Well, should he be celebrating? Is that a lot of money?" And in financially mathematical equation, you can plug in the rate and the time, and the 93 cents -- not even a dollar -- and you get lots and lots of money at this stage. So this seems like a very artificial example. As I said, it's in a cartoon. It's funny. But then I connect, in that example, my students to Benjamin Franklin, who did something similar. He left a thousand pounds each to the Cities of Boston and Philadelphia. And we look at a project to talk about, what would you have done with that money, and look at what actually happened in real life. So this very artificial cartoon setup that seems made up, because who's going to leave their money for a thousand years then have access to it, turns into something where we think about helping the community and benefitting not just yourself, but those to come later. So for me, it's a combination of the humour, also the visual components and the audio components of the show that really helps. And it's not any different than other types of tools. So it's, on the other hand, very well - connected to what I want to do anyways, and works better than a more static example that I would have given. So one of my favourite mathematical moments that I share with students around Pi Day every year is a reference where Apu, the local owner of the Kwik-E-Mart is on the stand in The Simpsons, and his memory is being challenged. And so he says he knows 40,000 digits of pi, and that the last digit of those 40,000 is 1. And Homer, bumbling father thinking a lot about food, as he often does, says, "Mmm, pie," meaning the kind of pie that you eat. So that's a really quick little clip. I really enjoy it, because then I can start to ask my students, "How many digits of pi do you know? Is it even possible for a human to know 40,000 digits of pi? And at first glance, they think the answer is no. But my husband is a musician, and he knows much more than 40,000 music notes for songs that they play for hours on end. And in the same way, anybody that is an actor certainly memorizes many, many lines as they're working in that realm. And one of the great things about that is that if you listen to the audio commentary of The Simpsons, you would hear about the fact that they joke around about having Al Jean's personal assistant compute all those digits. Al Jean has a bachelor's degree in mathematics, and he's show runner of The Simpsons right now. And then you would hear them joke about contacting NASA. But it turned out when I was talking to the writers that they did contact NASA at the time. And a mathematician there sent them not just the number one, but facts pages, and pages and pages and pages of those 40,000 digits. So you can imagine all these facts pages coming in. And as the kind of nerdiest Simpsons math moment ever, I show my students a reference that the writers made me aware of that I hadn't noticed, which is another episode where they are computing a bar tab. So they joke about sending away to NASA for the bar tab, and there's a stack this long for that. And that's a reference to all those facts pages that came back. And so I really liked that reference, because it gets students thinking about what's the limit of human ability. And also, we talk about why you might want to compute digits of pi, and how people compute digits of pi, or memorize them in this case. So I've seen very quiet, shy students all of a sudden see a little bit of a cartoon and then laugh. And they don't even have to be fans of the shows, they just light up. And it not only helps connect them to the mathematics, but then then they feel connected to me. They start talking about what pop culture they like to watch, and whether it has mathematics or not inside of it. And so I mentioned some challenges earlier; one of the challenges of opening this up in the classroom is to stem some of that excitement, because I don't want my whole class to be about pop culture. So often, I will encourage to come to my office hours to chat with me about their individual interests, but it's a way to help connect us together. So as I said, I've just seen these students really open up both mathematically and personally to me, with just one or two references in the semester. There are challenges of using popular culture in the classroom, as well as great benefits. But that with careful consideration, the rewards are well w orth all the efforts, and that there are, at least in The Simpsons and Futurama, hundreds and hundreds of mathematical moments that we connect to the things that we teach, and that everybody needs to make a decision about what's really the best way to teach, in my case a lump sum formula, to my students? What's going to really help connect the material and learn and think more broadly than just their own personal finances? Because I want them to think about the world at large, and helping others do good.