It’s impossible right now for me to ignore the parallels between my lesson planning and my love for game design.  I think this is because there’s actually something going on between the two (but we can’t rule out the possibility that I’m just obsessed).

Today I taught my second math block in my official practicum term.  I gave students a significant challenge, but it may have stretched too far too quickly.  I’ve been giving them open challenges rather than easy answers, and trying to structure things in such a way that they can work it out.  I’m learning that accessibility is a key factor.  You could say I need to work on my intro levels to build up the skills and awareness of ‘verbs’ that they have on hand already.

I’m also finding it really hard to sit down and write here, as much as I want to contribute to the larger teacher-blogger community.  There are already a number of math / science teacher bloggers who are feeding me a constant stream of inspiration, and I want to give back to that.  When I sit down to write, though, it’s a struggle to pick out the bits in my head that are sharable vs the bits that are not.  Anything I say about my class has the potential to reflect publically on my students.  When things go wrong with my lesson, I know that my delivery, my preparation, and my knowledge are not the only factors involved.  Students’ lives are just as messy and complicated as mine, and they’re not mine to share to the world.

Still, I’ve seen too much awesome being blogged out there to ignore.  I need to do this.

Right now I’m faced with a problem: my budget is incredibly tight, I’m bored of all the music I own, and I’m a stickler for copyright ethics.

On the bright side, I live in Canada.  This means that the filthy major record labels already have more of my money than I gave them for music purchases, due to the blank recording media levy.  I’ve bought a few stacks of blank CD-Rs over the past few years that I’ve used for data, not music, but I’ve still paid the 21 cents per disc.

So how do I translate that to mp3 downloads?

Arguably, I could say that the levy is in support of personal copying, and then go on and leech as many mp3s as I want.  Legally, this is a possible defense but it hasn’t been tested in court as far as I know.  Ethically, I don’t know that I want to go there.

I don’t have a solution, but my gut feeling is that it should be arguable for me to download a small number of mainstream albums based on levy fees that have gone to their record labels already.  (Fees are distributed based on commercial radio airplay, which means indie labels and artists don’t see much of this money.)

This is pretty tempting to turn into a numeracy lesson.  The math is there, it doesn’t require any difficult techniques, and there isn’t one clear right answer.  I could hand them data on levy amounts, on average CD costs in physical and digital stores, and maybe to stir things up include data on the breakdown of how much money from each CD sale goes to various parties (distribution, publisher, artist, marketing, etc).