So You Think You Can Dance?

Before last season my daughter and I caught a preview of this show, and we thought some of the silly auditions were funny enough to watch so we decided to start taping it. My wife and I figured that we would get a laugh out of it at least.

That was then. This is now.

While I was in high school I went to dances – and did something I like to think was dancing to the music. As a young boy I even took dance lessons (only boy in a class with about 13 girls… I never said I was stupid!). However, other than catching a Riverdance performance I will say that I have never really watched dancing with any conviction. So You Think You Can Dance has changed all that. I would never have thought I would buy into a reality show like I have this one.

Yes, Mary Murphy drives me insane. But in between the ridiculous screams she has some insightful and productive things to say. Unlike the token Englishman on American Idol, you can see Nigel’s love for all things dance every time he speaks. And I love the guest judges. Mia, Tyce, Adam, and so on are great to listen to – only second to seeing them choreograph.

There have been some pieces in the last two years that really stuck with me – Katee & Joshua were a couple last season that showed me what it could be about. But I just saw the show from July 22nd (not the results yet!) and the second dance from Melissa and Ade to the song A Woman’s Work blew me away (haven’t seen it? Go here.). My mother is a breast cancer survivor – which for those of you haven’t seen the show is the concept Tyce choreographed the dance around – and it was powerful. No other couple still in the running could have done it the way these two had. I was not thrilled with Melissa’s solo, and I was pretty much counting her out, but her flawlessness in this dance in transmitting the pain and frustration – as well as hope – that someone in the throes of this deadly disease experiences makes me hope she is still in it.

I am humbled. I wish that I could show the kind of feeling they did. Awesome.

It Has Been Awhile

I know it has been awhile since I last posted. This last year I took on the role as co-chair of our math department and for a number of reasons this consumed my life over the past six months. Now that it is summer, and I have returned from my summer conference, I am now teaching a summer calculus class to two students who want to skip our Calc AB class right to BC next year. It has been a lot of work – more than I had planned – and as a result I have not gotten to the planning I wanted to yet this summer.

I will begin the third year of the current iteration of my Calc BC class this fall. This will be my 7^th year teaching BC, but the 3^rd since I started the problem-solving approach. It has been going well, and I am now contemplating introducing the same method for the Geometry Honors class that I will be teaching this coming year. My AP exam results for the last two years of this method have been good. Out of 13 total students (yes… that’s all in 2 years), 11 earned 5s and 2 earned 4s. Of the two that earned 4s, one had missed nearly a month of school for various reasons in the month and a half before the AP exam.

This all brings me the question I am thinking about. To what extent should students be doing math versus learning about math. Just to clarify what I mean. I consider the typical presentation, followed by examples, followed by practice to learning about math. Repeating what the teacher shows you is not doing math in my opinion. That is technical training, not doing mathematics which, to me, is a much more creative process. I already try to balance this, although I admittedly tend – at least in my Calc BC class – on the ‘doing math’ side.