School portraits / A pupil’s 2014 recollection
At Bank Street, Crying Counts as Data
Normally, watching television is what children do instead of their homework. In Irene Loewenson’s math class, it was the raw material.
Normally, a parent has a very simple response when a child is sprawled on the carpet watching reality television: turn it off and do your homework. The trouble starts when the television is the homework. In her Bank Street graduation speech, Irene Loewenson recalled finding an unassailable use for America’s Next Top Model. In fifth grade, her research question was whether the number of times a contestant cried had any relationship to how many episodes she survived.
It is hard not to appreciate the tactical brilliance of this. If an adult walked past the room, she was not wasting an evening on melodramatic runway eliminations; she was gathering data. The project taught her graphing and correlation versus causation.
Television became a recurring habit in her math assignments, but after another project about the Kardashians, her mother stepped in with an affectionate warning. Her mother suggested this might be the last time she could get away with it: high school teachers would probably be less impressed, and she ought to enjoy this happiness while it lasted.
Irene agreed with her. Even without television, she expected math to remain her favorite. Still, her mother’s forecast had an unmistakable ring of truth. There are very few places outside middle school where you can hand an adult a chart of other people’s tears and receive credit for it.