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Wednesday, March 20, 2024
Why this math professor is putting actors in classrooms
CNN: Po-Shen Loh is a man on a mission. A professor of mathematics at Carnegie Mellon university, in Pennsylvania, he believes that reimagining the way we teach can help future-proof youngsters in a world where AI poses a growing threat to job security.
8 comments:
Carly Tamborello
said...
RIP High School Musical, you would’ve loved this math professor who puts actors in classrooms :( For real though, I think this is a fascinating idea. I’m not fully clear on how exactly the “real-time” feedback works, and I’m curious about how the teachers and actors are being selected or compensated. I think it’s interesting that this program is working with high school students as the math teachers but the actors training them are theatre majors or professionals, and I wonder how all the different parts of this project came together. That said, acting or theatrical training in general definitely has transferable skills that can make any area involving public speaking, such as education, much more engaging and less painful. Actors can make the best teachers, lawyers, politicians, counselors etc because they are able to funnel those skills for engaging an audience/ speaking clearly and intentionally into working with or addressing others in a different capacity.
I've been loosely following Po-Shen Loh's work for a few years now, and I think he has some very interesting and helpful ideas (and some not-so-good ones) and is a person who really wants to make a positive change in the world. This idea seemed very out there to me when I first read the title, but it began to make more sense as I read more about it. Social media plays a large role in the lives of many children today, so it makes sense that education should harness this instead of shutting it down. This article also shows the importance of interdisciplinary work. There are so many links between different fields that may not be obvious at first, as shown in this article. I don't think anybody should limit themselves to just a certain thing because learning knowledge in different areas is often very helpful in gaining a greater understanding of knowledge in another area.
This is such an interesting thought process. I am still not fully sure how performing arts can work well with math but I think performing arts is valuable in many fields. Actors have to know how to articulate in a way that captures the audience and makes them follow along their stories and sometimes a new world and within doing that makes them interested enough to stick with it. Applying some of those same skills with the teaching of math or any subject is going to be helpful because people will be more interested because of the method that something is either getting told or talked about. I think that some of the ideas in this article are really interesting to explore and they should be explored by different professors outside of just math and be used to help people want to become more intrigued into their school work.
Mixing actors with math lessons is a cool twist. It's like a fresh take on learning in a world where robots and AI are everywhere. Sometimes, the problem with math isn't what we're learning but how it's being taught. Math can sometimes feel like a snooze fest, making it hard to stay awake, let alone interested. But imagine if math class felt more like you're watching a play or a movie. Teachers bringing that kind of fun and energy could really change the game. It also gave me some inspiration that drama does not have to exist only in theater, it can be applied to various fields, such as education, psychotherapy and so on. Mashing different things together not only makes learning more fun but also shows us how everything's kind of connected in cool ways. It's all about mixing it up, getting creative, and seeing where that takes us.
This article is SO interesting to me. Look, I understand I am not an actor and cannot act to save my life, BUT, I am an artist and I’d say I’m pretty good and creative when it comes to being a designer. The other thing is I am absolutely garbage at math. I HATE math, and coming to CMU, I didn't realize how much math was specifically in scenic design. I want to declare scenic design in my future, and I am also not the best hand-drafter either, but I want to be able to tell a story with my scenic designs. I think another thing that is awesome is the professor's way of restructuring how they teach math to students by using zoom. I definitely think students in the theatrical field can help students in the math field and vice versa. I definitely want to be better at math, and I’ll be checking out the professors' courses!
This is quite a smart idea. Po-Shen Loh has put actors in his math classes at CMU. With the rise of AI and people's addiction to technology, people have lost touch with the world, with reality with paper and a pencil, it is the sad truth but people don't even want to learn anymore. However, Loh believes that if you set up the classroom in a more social media-centered way it would help students learn. I agree with Loh, serious changes are going to be needed to continue every industry, especially education. If people lose the ability to sit in a classroom and learn, then I have definitely lost hope for generations to come. People won't become smarter, and who will teach the next? The act of learning used to be a privilege, some people couldn’t even go to school, and now it has to be manipulated to ‘stay interesting.’
THIS! I have been fighting to get people to understand this for so long! In high school I was incredibly academically focused and I often was grouped in with the “smart kids” but I was also a theater kid that could think creatively. I think that being able to think both logically and creativity has benefited me in so many ways. And I think that theatre majors have such a unique set of skills that can really benefit a lot of people. I was recently working on Greek sing which meant that I was the only theater major in a room full of CMU stem majors and it blew their minds that I had a really strong ability to lead and room and manage a lot of things at one time. It also blew their minds that after a tech week I was still caught up on school and I was not exhausted. I think that combining different majors is always valuable but the combination of math and theater is a particularly interesting one.
I am actually obsessed with this article. As someone that throughout high school I loved and was passionate about both theatre and math, I tried every way that I could think of in order to combine those two of my passions. My county had a district wide scholarship program called the “Best and Brightest” where one student from each school for each category is nominated and they submit and portfolio and then have an interview and for some reason I was my schools nomination for math which was very silly and then I did my portfolio and it was like all my theatre stuff with like some math thrown in. In my interview I talked a lot about the intersection of theatre and math however, the judges were not very perceptive to my intersection of the two and therefore I didn’t win which was totally fine but I do think that there is a really interesting intersection of math and theatre and I am happy to see that it is being explored in this article and hopefully it will become more widespread.
8 comments:
RIP High School Musical, you would’ve loved this math professor who puts actors in classrooms :( For real though, I think this is a fascinating idea. I’m not fully clear on how exactly the “real-time” feedback works, and I’m curious about how the teachers and actors are being selected or compensated. I think it’s interesting that this program is working with high school students as the math teachers but the actors training them are theatre majors or professionals, and I wonder how all the different parts of this project came together. That said, acting or theatrical training in general definitely has transferable skills that can make any area involving public speaking, such as education, much more engaging and less painful. Actors can make the best teachers, lawyers, politicians, counselors etc because they are able to funnel those skills for engaging an audience/ speaking clearly and intentionally into working with or addressing others in a different capacity.
I've been loosely following Po-Shen Loh's work for a few years now, and I think he has some very interesting and helpful ideas (and some not-so-good ones) and is a person who really wants to make a positive change in the world. This idea seemed very out there to me when I first read the title, but it began to make more sense as I read more about it. Social media plays a large role in the lives of many children today, so it makes sense that education should harness this instead of shutting it down. This article also shows the importance of interdisciplinary work. There are so many links between different fields that may not be obvious at first, as shown in this article. I don't think anybody should limit themselves to just a certain thing because learning knowledge in different areas is often very helpful in gaining a greater understanding of knowledge in another area.
This is such an interesting thought process. I am still not fully sure how performing arts can work well with math but I think performing arts is valuable in many fields. Actors have to know how to articulate in a way that captures the audience and makes them follow along their stories and sometimes a new world and within doing that makes them interested enough to stick with it. Applying some of those same skills with the teaching of math or any subject is going to be helpful because people will be more interested because of the method that something is either getting told or talked about. I think that some of the ideas in this article are really interesting to explore and they should be explored by different professors outside of just math and be used to help people want to become more intrigued into their school work.
Mixing actors with math lessons is a cool twist. It's like a fresh take on learning in a world where robots and AI are everywhere. Sometimes, the problem with math isn't what we're learning but how it's being taught. Math can sometimes feel like a snooze fest, making it hard to stay awake, let alone interested. But imagine if math class felt more like you're watching a play or a movie. Teachers bringing that kind of fun and energy could really change the game. It also gave me some inspiration that drama does not have to exist only in theater, it can be applied to various fields, such as education, psychotherapy and so on. Mashing different things together not only makes learning more fun but also shows us how everything's kind of connected in cool ways. It's all about mixing it up, getting creative, and seeing where that takes us.
This article is SO interesting to me. Look, I understand I am not an actor and cannot act to save my life, BUT, I am an artist and I’d say I’m pretty good and creative when it comes to being a designer. The other thing is I am absolutely garbage at math. I HATE math, and coming to CMU, I didn't realize how much math was specifically in scenic design. I want to declare scenic design in my future, and I am also not the best hand-drafter either, but I want to be able to tell a story with my scenic designs. I think another thing that is awesome is the professor's way of restructuring how they teach math to students by using zoom. I definitely think students in the theatrical field can help students in the math field and vice versa. I definitely want to be better at math, and I’ll be checking out the professors' courses!
This is quite a smart idea. Po-Shen Loh has put actors in his math classes at CMU. With the rise of AI and people's addiction to technology, people have lost touch with the world, with reality with paper and a pencil, it is the sad truth but people don't even want to learn anymore. However, Loh believes that if you set up the classroom in a more social media-centered way it would help students learn. I agree with Loh, serious changes are going to be needed to continue every industry, especially education. If people lose the ability to sit in a classroom and learn, then I have definitely lost hope for generations to come. People won't become smarter, and who will teach the next? The act of learning used to be a privilege, some people couldn’t even go to school, and now it has to be manipulated to ‘stay interesting.’
THIS! I have been fighting to get people to understand this for so long! In high school I was incredibly academically focused and I often was grouped in with the “smart kids” but I was also a theater kid that could think creatively. I think that being able to think both logically and creativity has benefited me in so many ways. And I think that theatre majors have such a unique set of skills that can really benefit a lot of people. I was recently working on Greek sing which meant that I was the only theater major in a room full of CMU stem majors and it blew their minds that I had a really strong ability to lead and room and manage a lot of things at one time. It also blew their minds that after a tech week I was still caught up on school and I was not exhausted. I think that combining different majors is always valuable but the combination of math and theater is a particularly interesting one.
I am actually obsessed with this article. As someone that throughout high school I loved and was passionate about both theatre and math, I tried every way that I could think of in order to combine those two of my passions. My county had a district wide scholarship program called the “Best and Brightest” where one student from each school for each category is nominated and they submit and portfolio and then have an interview and for some reason I was my schools nomination for math which was very silly and then I did my portfolio and it was like all my theatre stuff with like some math thrown in. In my interview I talked a lot about the intersection of theatre and math however, the judges were not very perceptive to my intersection of the two and therefore I didn’t win which was totally fine but I do think that there is a really interesting intersection of math and theatre and I am happy to see that it is being explored in this article and hopefully it will become more widespread.
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