Nisse Greenberg: What's In A Name
The Story Collider
Story Collider, Inc.
4.4 • 824 Ratings
🗓️ 19 October 2014
⏱️ 12 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
While teaching a math class, Nisse Greenberg is troubled by his student's name, and his own. Nisse Greenberg is an educator and storyteller who eats mostly vegetarian. Sometimes he eats wings because wings are really good. When he applied for a visa to go to India he tried to type "atheist" into the proposed slot for religion, but he accidentally typed "matheist." He found it more appropriate anyway. He teaches high-school math to high-schoolers and math philosophy to adults. He creates art with spreadsheets and quantitative analysis. He also curates storytelling for The Tank, and hosts the shows Bad Feelings, VHS Presents, and Drawn Out Storytelling. Here is his playground: nissegreenberg.com
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | A science story, huh? |
| 0:04.0 | Is NYU scientist the... |
| 0:06.0 | It felt... |
| 0:07.0 | It was so... |
| 0:09.0 | And I just thought, well... |
| 0:10.0 | It was that golden moment. |
| 0:13.0 | Because science was on my side. |
| 0:15.0 | Hey, everyone. Hey everyone, I'm Ben Lilly, and welcome to the Story Collider, |
| 0:27.1 | where we bring a true personal stories about science. |
| 0:30.3 | This week's story is from Nissa Greenberg. |
| 0:32.4 | The story was recorded in September 2014 at the National Museum of Mathematics in New York City. |
| 0:43.3 | So, class is almost over, and he raises his hand, and he wants me to check his work. I go over to check his work, but I'm not |
| 0:57.0 | going to check his solutions. I'm going to check his process too, because this is an idea |
| 1:02.0 | I pound into my students' heads, that it's not the answer that's important, it's the journey |
| 1:06.5 | that got you there. I focus on this a lot because I think it's important to understand that |
| 1:14.1 | every math problem is like a creative prompt, right, that allows me to see how my students think. |
| 1:22.3 | It's not just, you can't just write the answer down because that's like writing the first sentence |
| 1:26.4 | and then the last sentence of your term paper and not putting anything in between and that doesn't explain to me |
| 1:32.5 | everything that doesn't so you can't put down just your answer you have to put down and then I |
| 1:38.1 | demand that my class join me in a chorus of saying journey and all of them some of them some of them, a couple of them, a few, like |
| 1:45.3 | one of them, this kid, this kid definitely joins me in the chorus. |
| 1:50.5 | He's ingested, he like knows what I'm talking about. |
... |
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