The Junior Mints Problem

Am I excited to share this with you guys! But first a little back story.....

At roughly 4:30 pm on October 31st, I rushed to the local store to pick up candy to hand out to trick-or-treaters. I purchased two of these large bags of tootsie-rolls assorted goodies. We had all of 12 kids come to our door, so we ended up having a completely unopened bag. Sweet! More goodies for me and my wife! I opened the bag and to my horror, only ONE box of Junior Mints lay inside.....

Fast forward a week later and I share this story with my 7th grade, pre-algebra algebra class, with this picture

I told them about my struggle.

"That's messed up!" - "You got cheated!" - "I'd be so mad" - "What's a Junior Mint?" Were some of the responses I got.

"Is this a problem? What should we do?" I posed back to them

"Yeah, we need to call and complain!" - the general response I got from the group

"How are we going to prove to them that something is wrong?"
"WITH MATH!" - One kid responded with this, and I'm pretty sure there was a standing ovation, air guitar or something similar...the details are foggy; it was a long day.

"If there's four types of candy you need a one in four chance to get a Junior Mint, not a one in 55!" - Another kid responded, hinting at the math we were going to work on this week.

"Ok, we'll dig in deeper this week to make sure we have a solid case when we email the Tootsie-Roll company"

"Oh my god we are?!?" - Actual response from actual student.

"Yep we certainly are!" Me, dropping mic, walking away.

Using some theoretical probability and relative frequency we are going to find out what a proper bag of goodies should be composed of. We'll even through some ratios and proportions in there for good measure. Then we are going to email customer support at Tootsie roll to see what they think. I can't wait to see what the week has in store and I hope to update you guys when we are done! #makeitreal

REMAST, Instant Relevance, and those darn fidget spinners

WOW! A year has passed since my last blog! Time to pick up the slack!

I had the opportunity to spend the last two days at the 2017 REMAST conference. I talked personalized learning, learned about instant relevance and how to use those darned fidget spinners

We had Denis Sheeran, the author of Instant Relevance, as our keynote speaker. Here are a few highlights from his presentations

• Meet kids where they are at. If they want to talk about something-LET THEM! Bring the math into the conversation
• Turn to the annoyances/discipline problems: What is the best way to dab? What is the best fidget spinner? What gives us the best chance to land that bottle flip?
• Strike while the iron is hot! All of the above examples will not be relevant next year. We have to use what is relevant to the kids NOW!

Short post for now, but an awesome conference/workshop!