09.04.13Hyperboloid? Hyperboloid!
Heather Kirkpatrick is the Chief People Officer at Aspire Public Schools. She’s one of the most insightful people I know and combines her insight with a ton of decency, humanity and humility. So you pretty much want to take her advice when you get it. Anyway, she read my recent post on “Rigor Collapse” and emailed this in response:
“I actually think you do a disservice to the “narrowing” part of the process by calling it “rigor collapse.” Collapses are typically not a good thing and, while in an ideal world you don’t want teachers to have to narrow, it is at times, as you describe, the exactly right thing to do. I think you should simply call the entire process a hyperboloid – cool vocab word in addition to being one coherent process from big, wide, cool question, to narrow set of questions back to big, wide cool question(s).”
For the extra geeky Heather passed along further reading on the hyperboloid: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperboloid. But I’m thinking she’s probably right about the power generally of hyperboloids- ask something big…. narrow it down to a sit issue, a tiny little fulcrum, then blow it back up to the big picture once you get the details. Struck me that it’s a pretty good analogy for Close Reading as well. As we like to say, you need to understand the rigor of the microscope to understand the rigor of the telescope.
Anyway, here’s to hyperboloids. And hyperboloidic moments in teaching.
