Welcome Back, Global Math!







Welcome Back, Global Math!




Edited By Brian Bushart @bstockus

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Online Professional Development Sessions

#TMC17 My Favorites
Presented by Ali Grace Eiland (@AGEiland), Taylor Cesarski (@tcesarski), Joey Kelly (@joeykelly89), Brette Garner (@brettegarner), Madison Sandig (@madisonsandig4), Jami Packer (@jamidanielle), Jodi Kerble (@jkerble), and Trish Kepler (@KeplerTrish)

Join us for our FIRST session of the 2017-18 school year! Speakers will share recaps and favorite takeaways from Twitter Math Camp 2017 which recently took place in Atlanta, Georgia. Join us to be inspired and get some new ideas you’ll want to implement in the upcoming school year.

To join the meeting when it starts at 9pm Eastern (or RSVP if it’s before 9pm), click here.

Are you new to Global Math Department? Do you want to check out sessions from last year that you might have missed? Click here to learn more about upcoming sessions and to watch previously recorded sessions. The math department of your dreams is available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week!

The #MTBOS Never Sleeps

Welcome Back!

Welcome back to the Global Math Department newsletter for the 2017-18 school year! Last year we bid farewell to several veteran writers – but never fear! – we’ve gathered together a crew of fresh new voices in addition to a few writers sticking with us for another year. Each week they’re excited to share with you the blog posts, Twitter conversations, and other happenings from across the mathematical internet that resonate with them. We hope you enjoy the newsletter this year, and don’t hesitate to Tweet a word of thanks to a writer if you like something they share.

Written by Brian Bushart (@bstockus)

The Power of Community: Inspirations from #TMC17

TMC17 Logo.jpeg

I recently participated in my first Twitter Math Camp (TMC).  I was blown away, and I want to tell you why. 

TMC is unlike most math conferences because there are no attendees; instead, everyone is a participant. Because it is a community driven, grassroots conference for math educators by math educators, everyone shares the responsibility to create an inspirational, empowering, and inclusive culture that seeks to build the capacity of everyone in the community. Next year’s TMC is in Cleveland, OH on July 19-22. Mark your calendars and consider yourself invited.

I can’t possibly capture the scope and depth of my learning and all who attended. While I’ll still share one or two of my learning highlights, I invite you to check out the TMC wiki for presentations, workshops, and other inspirations from the community.

Grace Chen (@graceachen) delivered a powerful keynote speech about her life story and invited us to ponder the question: Is teaching necessarily political? Her answer: It’s complicated. And she asked: What politically motivated stereotypes could you disrupt in your school and classrooms? What counterstories would offer instead? In what ways do these stereotypes and stories create a culture of “normalcy” about who can learn and have access to high level mathematics and who cannot? You can read more about her work on Twitter and on her blog.

Sam Shah (@samjshah) invites us to make joy more visual in the math classroom. He shares his simple practice of letting students share with the classroom community when they experience joy during a lesson. His five minute talk is well worth the time. Or you can read his blog post about it.

My most important learning from TMC (#1TMCthing) is the power of a community that chooses to gather for the sake of learning together and sharing ideas. The commitment and passion to become more effective math teachers and more inspired math geeks was palpable and contagious last month. But our community has been weakened by a lack of diversity across the grade levels for years.

Graham Fletcher (@gfletchy) shared this image during his engaging and compelling keynote (11:30 mark on this video). It shows data from TMC 2015, but also closely represented the population in 2017.

To become a stronger, more brilliant community, we need to learn more from members in elementary education. If you are an elementary teacher, I encourage you to give a talk at TMC 2018. At the very least, come participate and help us get better! We need your perspective, wisdom, and teaching techniques. If you are not an elementary teacher, extend a personal invitation to the elementary teachers you know. If you need more inspiration, check out Tracy Zager’s (@TracyZager) keynote talk on this topic at TMC 2016.

Lastly, a huge thank you to Lisa Henry (@lmhenry9) and all the volunteers who make TMC happen. You can follow them on Twitter at @TMathC. Hope to see you there next year!

Written by Chase Orton (@mathgeek76)

Did Someone Say FREE?

In case you haven’t heard… the team at Illustrative Mathematics (@IllustrateMath) wrote a FREE curriculum (yes I said FREE) for grades 6 through 8 to be released by Open Up Resources!

The Illustrative Mathematics Middle School Curriculum is innovative, coherent, and provides access and rigor for all students. No stone was left unturned when crafting these materials. The level of passion and scrutiny that went into all things created is mind boggling. This curriculum “elevates mathematics instruction and sparks enjoyment of mathematics for students in a whole new way!” Just check out the work done on the embedded Geogebra applets released here.

The team was led by William McCallum (@wgmccallum)–who has promised to get back to blogging more often over at Mathematical Musings. This spring he wrote a four part series on Curricular Coherence. He shared, “…a coherent curriculum, focused on how to get students up the mountain, would make sense of the journey and single out key landmarks and stretches of trail—a long path through the woods, or a steep climb up a ridge.” From what I’ve seen…I believe the team has accomplished this. You can read the rest of his first post in the series here.

Another member of the Illustrative Mathematics writing team, Sadie Estrella (@wahedahbug), recently wrote about her experiences as a teacher “create(ing) content from scratch.” She goes on to write, “during this time, I had various resources I used, random texts, blog posts, etc. But never did I find any text or curriculum that I felt met the teaching philosophy I had in my head and emanated throughout my classroom. Pretty much every text I encountered looked like a replica of what I experienced as a student and that is DEF insufficient.” This resonated with me and it felt like she was in my head.

Reading her post, I could feel her skepticism regarding the “whole curriculum thing (curriculum schmiculum).” She acknowledges that it took some time working on this curriculum before she was able to stand back to see its power. She shares, “what I came to realize at this moment was that good curriculum, curriculum that does a lot of the heavy lifting in math content, coherence and some teacher moves (5 practices) allows the teacher to re prioritize the work they need to do in order to support quality learning.” What a powerful statement! And it’s so true. Check out the entirety of this post over at her blog here.

Kate Nowak (@k8nowak) answers the question “Do I have to do it this way?” about the Illustrative Mathematics Middle School Curriculum over at her blog. She chose a great analogy credited to someone at the Louisiana Department of Education.

Source: https://pixabay.com/en/chefs-competition-cooking-749563/

She writes, “if you were to try and cook a new, complicated recipe, you would probably make it as it’s written the first few times you make it. You don’t know what all the ingredients are for, you don’t know the rationale behind all of the instructions, you don’t really understand how it works, yet, before you cook it a few times. Once you start to understand the recipe, though, you can make smart choices to modify it to suit your tastes and needs: substitute green beans for eggplant, leave out the almonds, or take it out of the oven a little earlier, for example.”

And then there is the work happening over at #learnwithIM. Check it out and you’ll see teachers from across the country giving up their time this summer to learn, collaborate, and grow from working with this curriculum.

The anticipation is growing!!!

The decisions made by the writing team were incredibly purposeful. The curriculum tells a story. I’m so excited to see what they do next!

Written by Bridget Dunbar (@BridgetDunbar)

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