A year and a half ago, I made the best dietary decision of my life and decided to try a vegan diet for 30 days.  Fast forward to now, I love the vegan lifestyle and I’d never go back to a diet filled with animal products.  I know too much.  But that’s a story for another post.

A couple of weeks ago, I logged into Robert Kaplinsky’s presentation on Global Math Department.  He started off with a visual, which is usually good to draw listeners into the presentation.  However, this visual was a cheeseburger.  And he went through more and more visuals, and the cheeseburgers kept getting bigger and bigger until finally I’m face to screen with 100×100 cheeseburger from In N’ Out burger.  I try very hard not to be one of those ‘enlightened and superior’ vegans who constantly judge the dietary choices of others, but these burger pictures were not how I envisioned spending my Tuesday evening.  His methodology had my attention however.

After explaining his problem solving process and distributing his problem solving template, he threw this photo into the mix and asked,

“How much would that 100×100 cost?

Now I was hooked and needed to figure out how much that 100 x 100 cost.  I didn’t care if it was a cheeseburger or a truckload of kale.  The wizardry of Robert Kaplinsky drew this vegan teacher into the problem solving process and made me care how much this monstrosity of a cheeseburger cost.  Brilliant.

Then Robert Kaplinsky threw down the dynamite:

That’s right.  The actual receipt of this 100×100 cheeseburger.  A boatload of kudos to Mr. Kaplinsky for presenting something that was simple, with some great mathematics to go with it.

I’m glad this weeks ExploreMTBos mission was LISTEN and learn.  This was a great presentation, a great lesson, and a great resource.  I’m glad I took the time to listen to Robert Kaplinsky’s presentation, even if it wasn’t so appetizing on the outside.