Mr. Hansen’s Goals for a Class Stunt

[rev. 5/7/2010]

1. No publicity, please. The teacher in the “no desks” story reported in Snopes.com became famous, but that is not what I am after.
2. The stunt must be safe, legal, ethical, and low-cost. See below for examples of near-miss ideas, as well as some ideas that I will not consider.
3. The purpose of the stunt is to create an educational experience that students will remember for a lifetime.
4. The stunt must impact all students in the class. Thus it must be sprung on short notice on a day when everyone is present.
5. The stunt could be designed for HappyCal, STAtistics, Geometry E, Geometry F, or any combination. Be sure to specify which class or classes are involved.
6. The term “educational” is to be interpreted broadly. A stunt having nothing to do with mathematics could still have great educational value.

Examples of stunts which I have tried in the past, but which have probably fallen short of goal #3, include these:

• Outdoor scale model of solar system
• Protractor/trigonometry calculation of National Cathedral’s west tower height
• GPS/trigonometry treasure hunt (box of chocolates)
• Each student writes his own obituary for the year 2080 or whatever, but it is sealed and never shared
• Contests of various types (Big Trig, JBAM, arithmetic speed challenge, spelling/number bee, etc.)
• Sleep Week
• Field trips (but note, it is impossible to schedule any field trips other than our NSA trip this school year)
• Laser tag outing, suggested by a student. My concerns with laser tag are that although it is fun, it is not particularly educational, and the memory does not exactly last a lifetime. Plus, because of scheduling problems, it is almost impossible to get 100% of the class to come to anything other than the scheduled class meeting, and even then, only about one day in four will have 100% attendance. On April 26, we managed 94% attendance for the practice AP exam, but I want 100% for the stunt.

Some examples of ideas that will not be considered:

• Embarrassing individual students, with or without their permission
• Stereotyping, even if undertaken in “politically correct” ways. For example, I feel that singling out students of Anglo-Saxon descent, or students who are football players, or well-to-do students, or whatever, is still wrong if it is used for purposes of stereotyping, even if the stated purpose of the stunt is to raise people’s consciousness. I went through a diversity training session a number of years ago that involved, among other things, my Norwegian ancestry being held up to ridicule. Now, that is considered “okay” since Norwegians are not an oppressed group, but I have to tell you, it was one of the most awful things I have ever had to endure. It was an educational experience that will last a lifetime (the purpose, I think, was to have us learn how people of oppressed minorities must feel every day of their lives), but the way it made me feel was not something I want to inflict upon my students. You should have that experience sometime in your lives; I definitely recommend it, and believe me, I learned a lot, but I think you need to be older, and I do not want to be the person who teaches it to you.
• Coupling the stunt to grades in any way. For example, one year I tried to grade the Cathedral tower project, and although the stunt itself worked fairly well, the grading aspect was a miserable failure.

Although I consider it unethical to single students out to make uncomfortable points, I am interested in stunts that raise consciousness about issues of economic diversity. This could be done safely by illustrating statistics that are not identifiably tied to the specific students in the room. Randomly chosen students could serve as stand-ins for demographic groups, or M&M’s, marbles, or jelly beans could be used to represent data. For example, a collection of 7,000 marbles would serve beautifully as a representation of the world’s population: 1 million marbles per person, with all the blue marbles being U.S. citizens, all the striped marbles (including some blue ones) being people who go to bed hungry each night, and so on.

I am particularly interested in stunts that dramatically illustrate surprising numeric facts. For example, when I build the scale model of the solar system with my freshmen each year, we use a medium-sized orange at the sundial in front of the Little Sanctuary to represent the sun, and all of the planets (scattered between the sundial and Cactus Cantina) are tiny bits of Play-Doh. On this same scale, the next star is about 1600 miles away, in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Remember, too, that we live in a fairly well-populated chunk of the Milky Way galaxy, and the space between galaxies is millions of light-years of nothingness. (Well, perhaps not complete nothingness. There is a problem of dark matter, which nobody understands yet.)

Another stunt would be to make a histogram of wealth with jellybeans or M&M’s. Each M&M could represent 3 million people in the U.S., or blue M&M’s could be for the U.S. and orange M&M’s could be for the world. (If using the world, a scale adjustment would be needed: perhaps 30 million people per M&M, instead of 3 million, so that 230 M&M’s could represent the entire world.) Using a standard piece of notebook paper, we make a horizontal scale representing wealth from $0 to $1 million. In other words, 1 inch = $100,000. All of the M&M’s but one would fit on this piece of paper and would represent the fact that virtually all the people in the world have a net worth of less than $1 million per person. Remember, one inch of horizontal scale equals $100,000. Each millionaire in the world is represented by some tiny sliver of that last remaining M&M. Where is the sliver for Bill Gates located? Answer (after a long pause): 10 miles away.

Or, to put it another way, we all know that $1 million, even today, is a large amount of money. Using $100 bills, laid end to end, $1 million would make a chain that stretches for approximately 1 mile. That’s a lot of money: a chain of $100 bills stretching for a full mile. Merely picking up the $100 bills off the street would take you hours. The wealth of Bill Gates is (in round numbers) about 50,000 times greater: a chain of $100 bills that stretches for 50,000 miles.

To count out the wealth of Bill Gates in $1 bills, counting as fast as a person realistically could, 2 bills per second, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, would take approximately 800 years.

Another stunt I have considered doing but have never implemented would be to count out the wealth of the U.S. using 1,000 phony $50 billion bills. Bill Gates and Warren Buffett would each get one, the top 1% of families (about 3 million people in all) would split the next 340, the next 9% of families would split the next 370), and the next 10% of families (about 30 million people) would split the next 134. At this point, we would have distributed 846 of the 1,000 bills to the top quintile of Americans, about 60 million people. To make the stunt more memorable, a random fifth of the class could play the role of the top quintile. For example, in a class of 15, we would have 3 students holding 846 slips of paper, each slip looking like an obviously phony $50 billion bill. Dramatic pause. How . . . do . . . we . . . distribute . . . the . . . remaining . . . 154 . . . bills?

Remember, the first 846 bills went to the top quintile of Americans, approximately 60 million people, and the question before us is how to distribute the remaining 154. In a class of 15, we select 6 students at random to represent the next two quintiles, the 120 million Americans who consider themselves “middle class,” if you will. They get 152 bills collectively.

The remaining 6 people in the class represent the lowest two quintiles of the wealth distribution, the poorest 120 million Americans. Their allocation is 2 bills.