This Week at Global Math – 2/23/2021







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Curated By Chase Orton @mathgeek76

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Online Professional Development Sessions

Please join us Tuesday, March 2nd for:

“Advanced Algebra with Financial Applications” An Algebra 2 Alternative for Struggling Students

Presented by Dr Robert Gerver

Selected topics from Algebra 2, probability, statistics, trig, geometry and precalculus, all taught with an algebra 1 prerequisite, are used to cover banking, credit, mortgages, income taxes, auto insurance, investing, budgets, and much more. The perfect alternative to algebra 2 for a struggling student who would be set up for failure in algebra 2.

To register for this webinar, click here.

No Webinar Tonight.
Instead, consider checking out our archives of previous GMD Webinars at the links at the bottom of this newsletter. 

#GMDWrites

Math Olympiads & Gender Silence

Now in my fifth year of teaching math at a girls day school, my local thinking is often oriented around identity factors other than gender (which is, very roughly speaking, held constant at my institution) as I focus instead on race, class, religion, etc. When I instead think globally (in the mathematical sense of the word) I become enraged with the accepted state of affairs as pertains to women and girls in US mathematics. (For just one example from the previous week – with follow-ups to come – see the blog post here. For an earlier GMD contribution from me on Gender Matters & More, see here.)

All of that is to say: Quanta Magazine has yet another terrible miss (and mess!) in its coverage of math olympiads. I tweeted out some of my thoughts:

Is this state of affairs acceptable from organizing bodies in mathematics? (Hint: No.)

The MAA is aware of these problems. Incidentally, there was an article in their own MAA Focus February/March 2019 issue by Boaler, Cordero, and Dieckmann entitled Pursuing Gender

Equity in Mathematics Competitions: A Case of Mathematical Freedom, which relates to a COMAP webinar tomorrow (Wednesday, February 24, 2021; sign up!):

Moving our gender focus momentarily from math olympiads to the actual olympics, a campaign against the overtly sexist Tokyo 2020 president was successful in pushing him out of his leadership role. What activist lessons can the mathematics communities learn from this?

Meanwhile, we haven’t heard from the MAA, nor from anyone at Quanta, nor from the current coach on whom the earlier article is focused. Despite my tweets and tags, they have all been silent (as of the time of my writing). But, I did notice a few others who were voicing their displeasure – women mathematicians who have not been silent – and three of them wrote the piece below.

– Benjamin Dickman [@benjamindickman]

 

An AMC for the Mathematics Community

 So you’d never drop a problem?
If it’s a math problem, it’s hard to get something that would make me drop it, unless somehow something was proved that said that it is not possible. To me, “drop” is a really strong term. Because what if in 10 years a new technique developed? It’s a new weapon, you should try it.
– Coach for the International Math Olympiad US team, in Quanta Magazine
 
Making mathematics more inclusive? It’s a difficult problem but not an impossible one. As a community, we have not exhausted our arsenal of weapons to fight for diversity, equity, and inclusion; even if it takes decades of work, we cannot drop this problem! Inspired by the MAA’s American Mathematics Competition, we invite the mathematical community to participate in the following exercise. Share your answers (full or partial) on Twitter with #GMDWrites.
 
About the Authors: We three authors met on Twitter in a thread about the Quanta interview. We decided to get together (on Zoom! on a weekend!) to talk about some of the exercises below, and we’ll continue to meet to formalize some of these thoughts into a letter to the MAA and to Quanta. We hope others will join us to continue this discussion, as each of the three of us carries the privilege of being a tenured white woman mathematician, and thus our perspective is limited.

Topics for this year’s exercises were retrieved from the Mathematical Association of America.

1. Community. Should we believe that “the best pre-college math students in the world” are represented in the International Math Olympiad (IMO)?


Locations of 348 US high schools listed on the Achievement, Honor, and Merit Rolls of the AMC 2020 10/12 A and B events extracted from the AMC Historical Statistics tool, Google Maps, US Postal Service zip codes, and the Department of Education Public School Locations.
 
  • What efforts are being made to create math competition teams for high school learners, especially those in underserved communities? About 6,000 secondary schools in the US have teams, but there are approximately 35,000 high schools in the US.
  • Does there exist professional development with the explicit mission to build a network of coaches in a broader range of high schools?
  • How can math competitions (including the AMC) promote more collaborative problem solving? How would this affect the community of participant.
2. Inclusion. Who gets to enter the competition funnel? What are the barriers to entry?
  • The MAA allows users to create a report to study the breakdown of AMC participation in terms of the gender binary. What could we learn if we could create reports along other axes of diversity (race, ethnicity, ability/disability, gender identity, socioeconomic status, geographical location…)?
  • Since we do have limited data about gender… where are the girls? Why are they competing in the European Girls’ Math Olympiad?
  • How could math competitions (including but not limited to the AMC) broaden access to mathematics?
3. Communication. Should we be satisfied with the answer given by the US math olympiad coach when asked about diversity and gender representation? What could a truly transformative approach to coaching look like?

Excerpt from the Quanta interview
 
  • Who gets to represent mathematics in venues like Quanta? What does that mean for how mathematics is represented? Whose achievements are highlighted?
  • How could the structure of, and participation in, the decades-old AMC to IMO competition pipeline reflect our changing society?
  • Why does the MAA promote this competition instead of others? What does the participation and format of the AMC competition (multiple choice test where students work independently) communicate to K12 students and teachers about mathematics?
  • How could the MAA celebrate and advance creative mathematical achievements of high schoolers beyond the six students celebrated at the end of the IMO?
4. Teaching and Learning. What can we infer from a track record of 36 men, 0 women in the US Math Olympiad team led by this coach?
 

Data retrieved from https://www.imo-official.org/
  • How could the AMC to IMO competition pipeline align better with MAA’s vision to use mathematics to “promote human flourishing”?
  • Why does it cost so much to prepare? How could the MAA provide high quality, free resources for the broader community? What role could the US team’s coach have in providing these resources?
  • What are the research-based instructional methods and resources that are being used in IMO coaching?
Extra Credit. Microsoft is training a computer to solve International Math Olympiad problems. What can we infer about Microsoft’s view of “the Grand Challenge” facing the IMO?
 
***
 
In the Quanta article, the US team’s coach describes his approach to mathematical problem solving:
 
You can’t just sit there and say: “I don’t know if this idea will work. I don’t know if that idea will work. I’m not going to try any idea.” No, you’ve got to dive in. You have to already have the attitude that “I don’t know where this idea is taking me, but I’m going to push it all the way through.”
 
The structural problems that prevent a broader participation of students from underrepresented backgrounds in the AMC to IMO competition pipeline are real, and they parallel problems in the mathematics profession. Here, we encourage the IMO coach, the MAA, and the mathematics community to persevere in solving these problems: it’s time to dive in and push some ideas all the way through.
 

Get Involved with the Newsletter

Our team of writers and curators is committed to produce content that is reflective of our Statement of Solidarity and with the goal of moving these words into action.

With this in mind we are calling for new volunteers to expand our perspectives and raise our collective voices to move this publication forward. If you are interested in becoming a regular contributor or would like the opportunity to contribute as a guest writer, please fill out this form.

Research and GMD – Join the Study!

The Global Math Department and researchers at North Carolina State University are undertaking a study to learn about teachers’ learning experiences from participation in the GMD. You can participate in this study if you have participated in the GMD as a presenter, attendee of a GMD conference, or reader of the GMD newsletter. 

We invite you to click the link to join the study as a participant and to learn more!

Check out past and upcoming Global Math Department webinars. Click here for the archives or get the webinars in podcast form!

You can also visit our YouTube Channel to find videos of past sessions and related content.

Follow us on Twitter Follow us on Twitter

Visit our Website Visit our Website

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#DisruptiveNumbers, A Tool to Teach Mathematics for Social Justice – 2/16/21

#DisruptiveNumbers, A Tool to Teach Mathematics for Social Justice

Presenter: Bernadette Andres-Salgarino

Date: February 16, 2021

Recommitting ourselves to teaching mathematics through the lens of social justice necessitates the reinvigoration of our pedagogical approach to learning. #DisruptiveNumbers is a tool to provoke mathematics discourse to unravel the intricacies that numbers bring to uncover hidden stories that perpetuate partisanship in our society. In this presentation, activities that use numbers and data in real-world contexts, and stories to bring awareness of sociopolitical issues that impact students’ lives will be shared.

Recommended Grade Level: 6 – 12

Hosted by: Leigh Nataro

Watch the full presentation at: https://www.bigmarker.com/GlobalMathDept/DisruptiveNumbers-A-Tool-to-Teach-Mathematics-for-Social-Justice

This Week at Global Math – 2/16/2021







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Curated By Nate Goza @thegozaway

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Online Professional Development Sessions

Tonight at 9:00 PM EST!

#DisruptiveNumbers, A Tool to Teach Mathematics for Social Justice

Presented by Bernadette Andres-Salgarino

Recommitting ourselves to teaching mathematics through the lens of social justice necessitates the reinvigoration of our pedagogical approach to learning. #DisruptiveNumbers is a tool to provoke mathematics discourse to unravel the intricacies that numbers bring to uncover hidden stories that perpetuate partisanship in our society. In this presentation, activities that use numbers and data in real-world contexts, and stories to bring awareness of sociopolitical issues that impact students’ lives will be shared.

To register for this webinar, click here.

#GMDWrites

Liberatory Mathematics
for breaking out of jail
 
In 2019, I taught Contemporary Mathematics in a medium security men’s correctional facility. Prior to that experience, I had never been inside a correctional facility, nor had I had significant conversations with anyone who had been incarcerated. Following that experience, I started corresponding with inmates through the Prison Mathematics Project, and I am writing this piece with the following in mind.
  1. Through teaching and corresponding about math with incarcerated folks, I have uncovered a core principle of my teaching philosophy: “Everyone deserves to find freedom and joy in mathematics.”
     
  2. Incarceration and feelings of isolation while learning math create barriers to learning that are unique to the incarcerated

If you’ve been watching some of the developments in mathematics (like this recent lecture cancellation, or this call to boycott work with police and the military, or this predictive model for curbing white collar crime), you know that mathematicians are grappling with how it is used (e.g., to surveil and incarcerate people). Conversely, the prison apparatus has made its way into our classrooms (most recently through online proctoring and even full-on AI proctoring), treating students as potential offenders and seeking to curtail hypothetical cheating (aka carceral pedagogy). And — let’s not kid ourselves — mathematics as a subject is already laden with oppression. When a corrections officer learned that I was teaching math in the prison, he laughed and said, “That must be part of their sentence, but what did you do to deserve to be here?”

In my Contemporary Mathematics course, I had fully intended to give students my best active learning pedagogy in every class. But one day I arrived, waited with colleagues for almost 2 hours for correction officers to clear the instructors to go to our classrooms, and found an exhausted group of men. There had clearly been An Incident, and on a “normal” campus, I would have rescheduled our class. On this campus, rescheduling was impossible for logistical reasons, but also — my students wanted to be there, even exhausted, because our classroom was a different kind of space for them. Did we do the small group, active inquiry exercises I had planned? Reader, we did not. I covered some material with a (minimally) active lecture, and saved time at the end for just… sitting there. Doing math, not doing math, whatever.
“Every day that I wake up and go about my life I try not to allow the present circumstances that I’ve created for myself to determine the passions and the future I want to see myself in,” writes Christopher Jackson, an inmate whose correspondence with Francis Su inspired the book Mathematics for Human Flourishing. Su and other educators are working toward a vision of liberation while — and through — learning mathematics (see also @ATN_1863). This past summer, I attended a workshop on Embodying Liberatory Practices in the Classroom put on by the NYU Metro Center (@metronyu). This workshop was important to my own continued growth as a professor for many reasons, but in particular, it gave words to a feeling that had been growing as I experienced and learned more about math in prison. It’s not just students in traditional classrooms who deserve liberation; math learners in prisons deserve a liberatory classroom, too. 
To fully see our incarcerated students’ circumstances, we have to understand who is in prison. Given the demographics of the incarcerated in the US, rehumanizing mathematics and trauma-informed pedagogy are necessarily linked with liberatory mathematics in prisons. (In my 30+ years of being in classrooms as a learner or teacher, my Contemporary Math class had the most diverse group of students along the axes of age, ethnicity, and race.)  But the math pedagogy that works for joyful, collaborative, community-oriented mathematics in “normal” classrooms doesn’t seem to translate neatly to prison. Barriers to learning combine in ways that are specific to being in prison; a pedagogy for teaching in prison must anticipate and respond to those.

 
What I felt then (and still feel now) is that there must be more to teaching in prison than just doing my best and adapting on the fly. There is surely a network of people who are thinking hard about mathematics education for incarcerated people. And they’re not just thinking about how classrooms are a place for incarcerated people to learn mathematics, but they’re thinking about how teaching and learning mathematics is a way to affirm the humanity of incarcerated folks. And I want in!
So, dear Global Mathematicians, I hope you’ll correspond with me about the following questions:
  1. Who is thinking through/has thought through/wants to think through math pedagogy specific to correctional facilities? How do we keep in touch?
     
  2. What body of literature is out there that can help support improvements to prison education programs (including but not limited to improvements to, e.g., the interested instructor)? How does the interested practitioner find resources and opportunities like The Inside Out Center?
     
What is our homework as abolitionists — keeping carceral pedagogy out of our schools, keeping folks out of prison, ensuring that classrooms and prisons are safe places for those who inhabit them, and increasing access to liberatory mathematics? How can we be effective together where we might be ineffective individually?
 

The Profession of Education
 

This last week, Christie Nold (@ChristieNold) posted a tweet that went viral. In the tweet she responded to the idea of educators working over the summer, noting that we are all exhausted. Being asked to do additional work, which most of us already are in these days of hybrid learning, only raises our own awareness of the fatigue we all feel as we try to simultaneously survive a pandemic and educate children. 


 

The idea of students attending summer school is related to the new trend of discussing “learning loss”. For an excellent article on how the concept of “learning loss” is problematic, read this one by Julia Matthews. In it she states,

“The frame of ‘learning loss’ also highlights the flawed belief that learning is tightly bound to instructional minutes and synonymous with grading and testing. Yet meaningful learning is rarely “lost.” The imposed fear of falling behind on content delivery puts educators in an untenable position, and inserts a reductive version of school in the home.”
 

One thread that ties the exhaustion of teachers now and the made-up take on “learning loss” from the general public together is the deprofessionalization of educators. I wonder: 
 

     What would it take for education to be taken seriously as a profession? 
 
In March, April, & May, teachers were heralded as heroes. In August, when they asked for safe working conditions and guidelines during a pandemic, we were told we were lazy and didn’t want what was best for kids. And now, in February, a year from when pandemic teaching began, we are exhausted and asked to make up gains for children in an imaginary standard in order to appease the general public. How can the professionalism of a career that many claim is so noble and consequential for society constantly be the target for others to denigrate? 
 

  • Is it because we don’t have a standardized process for measuring teaching professionally? Nope, we have that. (see National Boards for Professional Teaching)
  • Is it because we need research that shows that teaching mathematics, knowing mathematics, and doing mathematics are inherently different sets of knowledge? Nope. We have that. (see Math Knowledge for Teaching from Ball, Thames & Phelps, 2008)
  • Is it because we need a large social catastrophe that demonstrates the weight of the profession in general society? (See the ongoing global pandemic)

 
If we have all the receipts for our work, how come others readily choose to ignore it as such? 
 
Sometimes, when I have more questions than answers, I go back and look at the receipts, especially the ones that come from the students. Fawn Ngyuen (@fawnpnguyen) posted yesterday asking teachers to share a comment that a student said that still makes you smile. The post brought me laughs, smiles, and a few tears. Thanks, Fawn. 
 
Pandemically Pondering,
 
Lauren Baucom
@LBmathemgician
 

The Critical Ninth-grade Year: Learning and Grades in a Pandemic
 

I hated teaching 9th grade math until I loved teaching 9th grade math. Ninth graders have a lot of energy and innocence but most of all, they have curiosity about the world, about themselves and their peers, about growing up and becoming a part of the world, and some (few) were even curious about math. Ninth grade is a critical transition year for young people and more so if you’re Black, Indigenous, or a person of color (BIPOC); research backs this up even if it’s not surprising for any high school teacher who has worked for even one year in a working-poor public school.
 
This pandemic has me thinking a lot about 9th graders whose only experience in high school has been online, not having opportunities to connect with their peers, explore extra-curriculars and sports and all the other rites of passages that come with transitioning from elementary to secondary. And not to romanticize high school in any way because a part of going to high school at least in places like Chicago also involves not being academically prepared for the demands of high school, challenges involved with navigating a new bureaucracy with its own set of norms and regulations, increased freedom, and not the least of it all, class content that quite honestly feels largely irrelevant for teenagers.
 
While most high schoolers may not drop out during their 9th grade, students grades and GPA in that first year are consequential for graduating high school, college enrollment, and even college retention through the 1st year. In their research report, The Predictive Power of Ninth-Grade GPA, the Chicago Consortium on School Research (CCSR) lays out their methodology and key findings that show the impact of a ninth grader’s GPA on the aforementioned outcomes. In their study that draws on data from over 180,000+ students across 8 cohort of students in Chicago from 2008 to 2013, ninth-grade GPA is a strong signal of what’s to come years later. The short of it is that the more we can help ninth graders experience success in their courses and freshmen grades, the more likely they are to stay in school and do well. The research base largely done by CCSR over decades now in Chicago Public Schools, has led to a key metric labelled the Freshman-on-Track metric that measures the number of students in a given school who have accumulated at least 5 full-year course credits and no more than one F in a core class. This metric has catalyzed freshmen teachers, administrators, and support staff to hone in on the 9th grade year ramping up efforts to provide students with the necessary supports to meet the metric. Schools have created such things as Freshman seminars dedicated to making the tools and steps for success explicit for students, summer bridge courses for struggling incoming ninth graders, additional academic supports at the ninth grade, among others. A system-wide focus on improving the Freshman On-Track metric with coaching and professional development resources has resulted in sustained, system-wide improvement in graduation rates, college access, and college retention rates. The documentary The Second Window: How a Focus on Freshman Transformed a System details the research base for its success.
 
Given what I know anecdotally from having taught 9th grade math for over a decade, in light of the amassing research underscoring ninth grade as a consequential year for academic success has me thinking a lot lately about ninth graders’ remote experiences with even stronger anguish. And while the above research tells us that ninth-year grades are key, remote learning has presented us with a unique opportunity to rethink the purpose and ways of education. I’m not interested in ‘learning loss’ as much as making a call to all ninth grade teachers to take stock of our classrooms, our students and their families, and even our own families and communities in the current moment. Although I recognize that we, as teachers, hold ourselves to high standards for teaching content, we must remember that we teach children and then we teach content. Although I truly believe that teachers of all subjects are making space for students to make connections and are attempting, in their own creative ways, to address students’ social emotional needs, I want to offer two ideas from my experiences having taught ninth grade for others to (re)consider:
 

  • Humanizing through Relationships: While not a new or unique idea, it is worth saying it again here: we have to find a way to humanize remote and hybrid spaces by placing relationships and students’ voices at the center. Whereas before we may have dangled grades and rules to try to get students to comply, it is clear that relationships and responsiveness could not hold a stronger imperative. This means that we may have to (if we have not already) let go of our press to teach as much content. We might even resurrect the Coalition of Essential Schools principle of ‘less is more’ here. If students are not engaged authentically, they are not really absorbing our lessons in any meaningful or enduring way. In order to engage students and meet them where they are at requires courage and vulnerability to put the textbook down and, yes, talk to our kids. Engage them in the current problem of teaching and learning, however you and your students co-construct it. By opening a mutual dialogue with students, you are offering them a space to co-author a solution that has more potential to actually be a solution, even if only temporarily, because the students created it. But know that students’ disengagement is not solely tied to remote learning as the pandemic has overwhelmed the kinds of supports that young people, families, and communities used to rely on in the past. This dialogue may raise issues that feel (and largely are) beyond our control. That is okay but sometimes just giving students the space to air their feelings and grief is an important step moving forward, building a community of connection. We must also find ways to celebrate our students, for their resilience, for their commitment to show up every day, and for simply being who they are.
 
  • Learning and Grades: I would be remiss to not return to the Consortium research cited above that strongly correlates grades with future academic outcomes. While there have been recent calls to radically transform our grading practices now more than ever, there has been growing evidence for some time now to support the ways in which our current system is antiquated, inequitable and even mathematically inaccurate (Feldman, 2019). Undoubtedly, schools have probably seen more F’s on students’ report grades at every level forcing administrators and instructional leaders to rethink their pandemic grading practices and, in some cases, even hold back students’ grades due to lack of assessment evidence as students turn in less and less completed work. I’ll offer here an alternative and fluent grade that we created at the Young Women’s Leadership Charter School (YWLCS) in 2000 called the Not Yet which incidentally Carol Dweck mentioned in her Ted Talk on Growth Mindset in 2014. Each course at YWLCS was tied to 8-10 outcomes (majority content-based with few behavioral outcomes) for which each student was given a grade among Highly Proficient, Proficient, or Not Yet. The girls (it was an all-girls public charter school) had essentially up until their Senior year to make up their Not Yet grades which required them to work with the discipline-specific teacher to make a plan to work on the content and make it up. There were benchmarks put in place to ensure we were not setting them up to make it too far along without any Proficient grades, but, for example, I could be approached by a student in Algebra 2 wanting to demonstrate proficiency in an Algebra 1 concept or skill. I might quiz her right there on the spot or ask her to do an assignment to demonstrate her competency. If she demonstrated proficiency, I could and would go into the system and change the grade. While this might appear overwhelming (and it was), we learned to be assessment heavy changing our instructional practices and shifting our conversations with students from completing work to demonstrating proficiency. This was significant and should not go understated. Not only were students talking about and demonstrating content, they internalized the notion that learning is ongoing and is based on effort not ‘smartness’. This assessment system, or at least the concept of a Not Yet, could offer our current students (9th grade and otherwise) acknowledgement that we are going through a pandemic together and that we hold their social, emotional, and physical needs with the utmost regard. It is not that learning is not happening: we might even take stock of what we are learning and reassure ourselves that academic competencies will be learned, in due time.

Written by Patty Buenrostro

Get Involved with the Newsletter

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With this in mind we are calling for new volunteers to expand our perspectives and raise our collective voices to move this publication forward. If you are interested in becoming a regular contributor or would like the opportunity to contribute as a guest writer, please fill out this form.

Research and GMD – Join the Study!

The Global Math Department and researchers at North Carolina State University are undertaking a study to learn about teachers’ learning experiences from participation in the GMD. You can participate in this study if you have participated in the GMD as a presenter, attendee of a GMD conference, or reader of the GMD newsletter. 

We invite you to click the link to join the study as a participant and to learn more!

Check out past and upcoming Global Math Department webinars. Click here for the archives or get the webinars in podcast form!

You can also visit our YouTube Channel to find videos of past sessions and related content.

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This Week at Global Math – 2/9/2021







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Curated By Nate Goza @thegozaway

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Online Professional Development Sessions

Next Week!

#DisruptiveNumbers, A Tool to Teach Mathematics for Social Justice

Presented by Bernadette Andres-Salgarino

Recommitting ourselves to teaching mathematics through the lens of social justice necessitates the reinvigoration of our pedagogical approach to learning. #DisruptiveNumbers is a tool to provoke mathematics discourse to unravel the intricacies that numbers bring to uncover hidden stories that perpetuate partisanship in our society. In this presentation, activities that use numbers and data in real-world contexts, and stories to bring awareness of sociopolitical issues that impact students’ lives will be shared.

To register for this webinar, click here.

#GMDWrites

February
By: Hema Khodai (@HKhodai)

 

We are not all surviving the same pandemic. 

Whatever version you find yourself living through as you read this, I hope there is something here that affirms your current reality and invites you into this community.
 

The Mathematics of Opportunity: Advancing Social Justice Through Math Education
 
Myself, I am intentional with my screen time and reserved energy to attend Dr. Ruha Benjamin’s Keynote Session,  Math and its Aftermath: Reimagining Data for Justice, at the Just Equations conference last week. This was my first experience learning from Dr. Benjamin and what resonated most  from her brilliant talk is that we must be as rigorous about the stories as we are about the statistics; the cultural narratives matter a great deal – they influence how people act on the data. It is the combination of powerful storytelling and meaningful data that drive societal change. 
  • Whose stories do we continually leave out of policy in education? 
  • Whose stories are routinely whitewashed in spaces of mathematics advocacy?
  • Do we accept that we are pattern makers? 

Check out #MathOpportunity2021 for more.
 
W5H
 
If you find yourself with 75 minutes to take in a Session Lecture, I invite you to view Dr. Erica Graham’s Anti-racism in mathematics. That may seem a daunting task right now so here is a summary in a blogpost. Or maybe you have the capacity to scroll, in which case I share with you Dr. Marissa Kawehi’s thread.
 

 
Action
 
Maybe you find yourself in a moment where you feel empowered to engage in the math ed world. If so, I encourage you to check out your local affiliations, associations, and organizations as this is election season for positions of power. Do research into who folx are, what they represent, how they move towards justice, and whether their why is rooted in care for children marginalized by systems of oppression.
 
The struggle continues
And friend, if you find yourself with absolutely no desire to do any of the above – rest. We’ll be here if and when you choose to return, to support you in your journey to work towards a better world.
 

Get Involved with the Newsletter

Our team of writers and curators is committed to produce content that is reflective of our Statement of Solidarity and with the goal of moving these words into action.

With this in mind we are calling for new volunteers to expand our perspectives and raise our collective voices to move this publication forward. If you are interested in becoming a regular contributor or would like the opportunity to contribute as a guest writer, please fill out this form.

Research and GMD – Join the Study!

The Global Math Department and researchers at North Carolina State University are undertaking a study to learn about teachers’ learning experiences from participation in the GMD. You can participate in this study if you have participated in the GMD as a presenter, attendee of a GMD conference, or reader of the GMD newsletter. 

We invite you to click the link to join the study as a participant and to learn more!

Check out past and upcoming Global Math Department webinars. Click here for the archives or get the webinars in podcast form!

You can also visit our YouTube Channel to find videos of past sessions and related content.

Follow us on Twitter Follow us on Twitter

Visit our Website Visit our Website

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Partnering with Parents in Elementary School Math – 2/2/21

Partnering with Parents in Elementary School Math

Presenter: Matthew Beyranevand

Date: February 2, 2021

In this session, you will deepen your understanding of parents’ needs and wants as they pertain to their children’s elementary mathematics education, as well as examine your own beliefs about partnering with parents. We will provide guidance for teachers and leaders on how to communicate with parents and caregivers, as well as offer practical tips that educators and school leaders can use immediately to systematically change their relationships with families.

Recommended Grade Level: K – 5

Hosted by: Jill Bemis

Watch the full presentation at: https://www.bigmarker.com/GlobalMathDept/Partnering-with-Parents-in-Elementary-School-Math

 

This Week at Global Math – 2/2/21







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Curated By Chase Orton @mathgeek76

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Partnering with Parents in Elementary School Math

Presented by Hilary Kreisberg and Matthew Beyranevand

In this session, you will deepen your understanding of parents’ needs and wants as they pertain to their children’s elementary mathematics education, as well as examine your own beliefs about partnering with parents. We will provide guidance for teachers and leaders on how to communicate with parents and caregivers, as well as offer practical tips that educators and school leaders can use immediately to systematically change their relationships with families.

To register for this webinar, click here.

Research and GMD – Join the Study!

The Global Math Department and researchers at North Carolina State University are undertaking a study to learn about teachers’ learning experiences from participation in the GMD. You can participate in this study if you have participated in the GMD as a presenter, attendee of a GMD conference, or reader of the GMD newsletter. 

We invite you to click the link to join the study as a participant and to learn more!

#GMDWrites

“Are you sure you’re in the right class?”
 
“Are you sure you’re in the right class?” My new complex analysis classmate had waited until I was seated, smiling gently as he asked. In each retelling of this now all-but-cliché micro-aggression (among others), I emerge victorious – armed with a savage comeback and the resolve to dismantle stereotypes about women of color in mathematics through my own achievements. In truth, I wasn’t sure that I did belong in that class; I had enrolled in the “honors” section only because the others were either full or conflicted with my work schedule. I remember little of my actual response beyond its awkward, muted rage, and the lingering self-doubts that my various forms of privilege and past successes in mathematics could not buffer against.
 
In the decade since, I sought to support my students, and particularly my female students of color, in cultivating the types of positive mathematics identities that I had struggled to maintain throughout my own schooling. Drawing from Dr. Erica Walker’s (@EricaNWalker) research on mathematics identity, I designed student reflections around their experiences with and perceptions of mathematics, hoping that routinely integrating stories of diverse mathematicians and mathematics origins would gradually shift their own narratives. I implemented further lessons, developed in collaboration with my Math for America colleagues, around Imposter Syndrome – seeking to address the self-doubts that continued to haunt our less confident students even after they had experienced success in our classes. It was disheartening to realize this year that, once again, our most disengaged and struggling students were disproportionately young women of color. Even successfully completing the most challenging problems and communicating their strategies to peers yielded only fleeting improvements.
 
I had assumed until lately that my own mathematics identity had finally solidified, equipping me with sufficient tools to support my students along their own math journeys. It was just this semester, however – upon enrolling in my first mathematics course as a doctoral student – that I recalled how stubbornly and insidiously one’s mathematics anxieties endure. I chose to take a mathematical foundations course with a favorite professor, having loved and enrolled in nearly every available formal logic course and set theory course as an undergraduate. Even so, I found myself paralyzed with self-doubt over our first assignment before so much as looking at the problems. Only at my friend and classmate’s commitment to attend office hours together did I work up the courage to go – again, despite already knowing and liking our professor. It is doubtful that any praise of my mathematics skills or recounts of past successes would have reassured me.

With new insights into our students’ experiences, and in coming to understand one’s mathematics identity construction as an ongoing (perhaps lifelong) process, I am left wondering how to shift beyond merely positive math identities and toward what Dr. Ebony McGee (@RelationshipGAP) terms “robust” mathematics identities: ones grounded in authentic enjoyment of mathematics and internal motivations to succeed as opposed to, for instance, disproving stereotypes or making one’s family members proud (see Figure 1 below for a summary of McGee’s (2015) Fragile and Robust Mathematics Identity Framework). Perhaps one step toward this goal lies simply in supporting our students in building and maintaining mathematics learning communities of peers they can relate to, as Walker has articulated. I can attest to the benefits of not only talking through problems with one’s friends, but also of rallying together to attend office hours and laugh at the occasional micro-aggression.

 
– Nasriah Morrison [@nasriahmorrison]

 
Six Direct Actions: BHM Reading; Org Joining; Math Talks/Trails
 
The six direct actions below are:

A) Follow/read Mathematically Gifted & Black.
B) Read some/all of the Notices of the AMS Feb 2021 issue.
C) Donate to Lathisms’ fundraiser for nonprofit status.
D) Join TODOS and vote in their Board Election.
E) Sign up to give a talk through TMWYF, or convince others you know to do so.
F) Learn about Math Trails and consider whether you can implement them at your own learning site(s) in an action-oriented manner.
 
With February comes Black History Month. Many white people found themselves saying, hearing, reading, writing, or thinking about “anti-Blackness” for the first time ever within the past year. For some, this apparent reckoning was long, long overdue. Rather than BHM being a month long respite from what educators usually do, I hope to use this month to examine my year round practices and see where I have evolved and where I still need to focus.
 
Still, there are particular ways in which BHM is celebrated in mathematics communities; here are two:
 
A) Check the Mathematically Gifted & Black (MGB) twitter account for daily spotlights; their full February calendar is available here.
 
B) Check the Notices of the AMS February 2021 issue (PDF) which kicks off with “A Word From…” Robin Wilson.
 

 
The mention above should not be construed as implicit support for the AMS. (It is true that I support MGB!) You may wish to learn more about a recent occurrence at the AMS around a sub-optimally named fellowship, and the nastiness directed towards a targeted few after pointing out this problematic feature. There are some AMS members reconsidering whether to maintain membership at all. See, e.g., the comment here (more generally, you can search twitter by latest as done here).
 
Segueing to other organizations, here are two recommendations for direct actions that you can take:

C) Support LATHISMS (site; twitter) by donating to their fundraiser around forming a nonprofit organization.
 
D) Join TODOS (site; twitter) where there is currently an ongoing Board Election for President, Vice President, and Director. Only members can vote, and I can comfortably say that this has been the most worthwhile org membership I have purchased: position papers and webinars alone justify the very reasonable cost.
 

 
In my personal capacity as a TODOS member, I endorse (and have already voted for):
Florence Glanfield for President-Elect;
Sylvia Celedón-Pattichis for Vice President;
Marian Dingle (@DingleTeach) for Director.
 
Finally, two items on what I am doing personally with math talking/teaching:

E) I gave a talk through Talk Math With Your Friends (TMWYF) that can now be found on YouTube [see also this related thread on imposter syndrome, which connects to Nasriah’s writing above!]. Thanks to the organizers for inviting me, and I remind GMD readers that they are looking for other presenters: Check the previous GMD Newsletter from Sep 8 2020 for a TMWYF contribution. Who can you encourage to participate? [Note: I’ve also accepted an invitation to speak at an ISDDE Virtual Conference in March 2021 called Designing for Equity; the plenary address will be from Robert Berry, who was the first MGB honoree this year.]
 
F) I have continued to think about “Math Trails” – which have been around since at least the mid-1980s – and ways in which they can be oriented more towards justice. You can find some of my thinking around this in the context of Stars On A Flag threaded here. In particular, there is a trail item around considering the aesthetics of a star arrangement, but it arises in the context of flag design if a new state is admitted to the US. I argue that we cannot be content to think about statehood only in the abstract context of whether star arrangements are pretty – even as I love the depth of mathematics involved in such a question. This is why my current assignment, in which students are to write a math trail item, has two additional prompts:

  1. name a justice-oriented context to which their item connects, or in which they are interested;
  2. look up who their House Representative is, and check Congress dotgov to see what connects to their item/context.
 

 
Which of the six action items above, from A through E, can you commit to?
What other actions are you taking, or planning to take, one full month into 2021?
 
– Benjamin Dickman [@benjamindickman]
 

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