Teach 180: What's Going on in This Graph? (Day 156)

Today I let my students experience the new New York Times feature called What's going on in this graph?  The students worked in groups to study the graph and answered the following three questions. 1) What do you notice?  2) What do you wonder? and 3) What might be going on in this graph?  After they discussed it together, we created a class post in the comment section.  Here are two screenshots of the graph, as it changed over time.

Here is what we composed as a class response to the three questions.  Our observations received a response from the moderator and a response from someone else.  

I'll be definitely taking these comments back to my students.  Once we look at the article at the bottom of the page, it will probably help students understand why including something, or leaving something off, a graph can help the graph tell a story.