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Mathematicians Ask for Help

One of the blogs that I try to read regularly is Michael Pershan’s “Teaching With Problems.”
Michael, who is the quintessential reflective teacher in my mind, wrote a lovely blog post this week titled “Mathematicians Ask for Help.”

In that blog post, Michael starts with a reflection about his own experience as a mathematics student. I love “hearing” teachers talk about their lives as students—and Michael explained that when he was in high school and also when he started college, he was not the type of student to ask questions in math class (nor was he encouraged to be).

Later, he realized how important it is for students who are struggling to ask questions. And he took this realization and incorporated it in his teaching practice. He describes a 9^th grader he taught some years ago, and how he handled getting this student to do just that.
 
Here’s what I did for my 9th Grader: I told the entire class, “I want you all to ask me questions. Lots of questions. When you’re feeling stuck: ask me for help.”
 
And, then, when my 9th Grader didn’t ask me questions I walked over to him: “I really want you to ask me some questions if you’re stuck.”
 
When that didn’t work (“I’m doing fine Mr. P”) I went back to him and I said: “You’re going to start having an easier time with these problems when you start asking me some questions.”
 
And, finally, when he asked me a question, I answered it as best I could and said, “This was great — please keep asking questions.”
 
He finishes that section with the following:
 
“…I beg kids to ask me questions. It’s how you grow.”
 
I love Michael’s persistence, and his expression to students about how much he cares about their learning.
 
It’s really a wonderful blog post, and I encourage you to go over to his blog, have a read, read the thoughtful comments below the post, and add your own thoughts.
 
–Written by Steven Gnagni (@Steve_Gnagni)
 

Exploding Dots and Global Math Week 10/10/17
 

Not to be confused with the Global Math Department, The Global Math Project (@GlobalMathProj) “aims to connect millions of students around the world through a shared experience of mathematics.” Global Math Week launches on 10/10/2017. If you have not yet seen Exploding Dots from @jamestanton (also from The International Maths Salute fame), you will be in for a treat! It’s mind blowing!! I was lucky enough to learn about this from Global Math Project ambassadors at a workshop this summer, and the participants could not believe that “exploding dots” could be used to teach everything from different bases to even polynomial long division! Click here to get a taste.

Register here and you will get all of the info below.

Prepare for October 10-17!

1. Discover exploding dots

• Try the full online experience (Available soon at www.explodingdots.org!)
• Get ready to teach with James Tanton’s videos
• Learn with teacher guides, student handouts and more to download.

2. Invite your colleagues! Tweet!

During the Global Math Week

1. Conduct an introductory lesson on Exploding Dots with your students

• Full technology: Start by sharing the following link with your students: (Available soon at www.explodingdots.org!)  Have fun collecting kapows! as students play with the lessons!
• Low technology: Show and discuss James Tanton’s videos
• Play, pause and repeat at your own pace!
• No technology: Follow the teacher guides to use nothing but a chalkboard, just as James always does!

2. Share something about your experience on social media. Join the global conversation on Twitter (#gmw2017 or #explodingdots) and on the GMP Facebook page.

Click here for the teaching guides, and enjoy exploding some dots with your students of all levels!
 
Written by Lisa Winer (@Lisaqt314)
 

New Ideas

The beginning of the school year is always an exciting time as a never-ending stream of new ideas stream across Twitter and my blog roll. Here are three resources that particularly caught my eye for various reasons…
 
1. Generalizing Student Thinking
 
For the past few week BerkeleyEverett has been sharing some amazing visual tools that help generalize students thinking. He finally got around to it and is now hosting and sharing his ideas over at Math Visuals.  He’s also asked for ideas on things to include so be sure to let him know.

2. Video and Resource Package for Difficult Standards
The Georgia Department of Education recently identified 5 difficult standards in each grade level K-12. They assembled a team of teachers from across the state to unpack and capture that standard being taught in a class using a video.  They plan to keep adding to the library over the next year.  The videos and resource package can be found on their webpage.

3. Same and Different
Brian Bushart shared a post during last week’s #elemmathchat.

The result of that tweet left Brian and I sharing dots, animals, Rekenreks, toast, and ten-frames over the weekend. Just another awesome routine to help our youngest of mathematicians.

Written by Graham Fletcher (@gfletchy)

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Math, Social Justice, and the Algorithms We Use

In my last post for this newsletter, I wrote about Grace Chen’s (@graceachen) speech at Twitter Math Camp during which she asked us to ponder the intersection between politics, social justice, and our work as math educators. (If you missed her talk, you can find part one here and part two here.) She has continued the conversation with more blog posts that you can read about here. Her most recent post unpacks and analyzes the concept of diversity and how it is framed in our work and has sparked some insightful comments. What would you add to the discussion?

It seems that there is a resurgence of the math and social justice movement in the MTBoS world and I wanted to curate some of the work that is being conducted. I hope that you find these resources useful in furthering your own exploration about math education, social justice, equality, fairness, and politics. This is by no means an exhaustive list. Please share the resources I missed with me on Twitter (@mathgeek76) and I’ll add them in my next post for the newsletter.

In the math and social justice “world,” there are a few opinions and approaches. Some educators believe that students in underserved communities must learn “traditional” mathematics because math fluency is a key that grants students access to better colleges, better jobs, and more freedom. Math literacy is a ticket that leads to socio-economic advancement. There are others who think math should be a tool for students to develop their critical awareness of social inequalities and injustices in this world. There are still others that strive to question the fairness and justice of the sorting algorithms we use in math education such as grading, tracking, course placement, instruction, and assessments. I won’t sort the following resources into these categories (nor will I weigh the pros and cons of each approach), but I offer you these categories as a way to structure your own professional learning.

Cathy O’Neil’s (@mathbabedotorg) powerful TED talk about the roles that algorithms and big data play in how society is structured is a great starting point. You can read her blog here. She also has a book out called Weapons of Math Destruction that you should check out. Annie Perkins (@Anniekperkins) is starting a book study for teachers on this book as well as Black Stats by Monique Morris. You can read more about Annie’s book club on her blog.

Paolo Freire’s book Pedagogy of the Oppressed was published in 1968 which doesn’t make it standard #MTBoS material, but should be mentioned. It’s rich with social theory and takes a zoomed out view on how education can be a liberating force for social equality or an oppressive force that seeks to reproduce socio-economic inequalities. It’s a long read, but worth the effort. It may change your life. You can find a PDF version of the text here.

Bob Moses’s Radical Equations is also an excellent book about how math education can be a force for social justice. You can read more about his Algebra Project initiative here.

If you’re looking for a book that you can use to structure some lessons, Rico Gutsteins Rethinking Mathematics is a good start. Political cartoons by the artist Polyp can also be a source for rich and engaging discussions about global socio-economic inequality. Charles Seife’s (@cgseife) book Proofiness: The Dark Arts of Mathematical Deception can also be a valuable resource to have high school students engage with statistics. Jonathan Osler started a website called Radical Math that contains a library of lessons that you can sort by grade level or topic. (The site does not appear to have been updated recently.)

Here are a few others in the MTBoS community that are writing about the politics and education that you may find worth following. The names are hyperlinked to their websites. Please Tweet me (@mathgeek76) the names of others I should add to this list.

• Sara VanDerWerf (@saravdwerf)
• Jose Vilson (@thejlv)
• Morgan Forest (@MsFierst)
• Anne Schwartz (@sophgermain)
• Marian Dingle (@DingleTeach)
• Erica Walker (@EricaNWalker)
• Stephanie Woldum (@mrswoldum)
• Ilana Horn (@ilana_horn)

Lastly, “Creating Balance in an Unjust World” is an annual conference that focuses on math education and social justice. You’ll find resources on their website and more information about the conference for 2018 on their website.

Written by Chase Orton (@mathgeek76)

As we begin a new school year, many of us are thinking about classroom culture and activities with which to start establishing relationships and classroom norms. A recent Sunday Funday blogging challenge on this topic prompted a number of blog posts in which teachers shared their start of year plans and go-to activities. Some of the common themes in these plans were:

• Jumping into actively doing math from day 1
• Being intentional with tasks so that they emphasize key classroom norms, like cooperation, justification, or valuing of multiple perspectives
• Building relationships with students

Some resources for math tasks that would make for good starting activities included:

• Inspirational activities from YouCubed
• Good Problems from Peter Liljedahl
• Cooperative activities from @mathequalslove
• Subversive Groups from @fnoschese

Teachers also discussed ways to get to know their students and to have their students get to know them.

• @saravdwerf shared the low-key way that she has students use name tents to respond to a daily prompt, which starts a written dialogue between teacher and student
• @ddmeyer has shared the popular Who I Am and Find Someone activities, which allow students and teachers to share information about themselves with each other
• @luvbcd shared an oldie, but a goodie: a Post-It activity from a few years ago to gather and display responses from each student on their hopes and goals for the class

Finally, as you prepare for a great year ahead, keep in mind that subject chats are starting up and are a great place to connect with Math teachers who teach some of the same content as you. Search Twitter for #alg1chat, #geomchat, #statschat, #precalcchat, #msmathchat, and #elemmathchat to see which topics have been discussed recently. The chats that have been already scheduled are as follows:

• #statschat is on the last Thursday of the month at 8 pm EST
  • The next scheduled chat will be on September 28th
  • The first chat of the year has been storified here
• #precalcchat is every other Thursday at 9 pm EST, starting on August 31st
• #msmathchat is Mondays at 9 pm EST
• #elemmathchat is Thursdays at 9 pm EST; the most recent chat has been storified here

If you have never participated in a Twitter chat, a good introduction to how they work and how to participate can be found here.

This spreadsheet of Twitter users and bloggers is also a great resource to connect with other teachers of the same course or age group. Each tab corresponds to a course or subset of math teaching. You may find it helpful to follow the teachers in your tab on Twitter, add their blogs to your blogroll, and tag them in specific questions.

Written by Anna Blinstein (@borschtwithanna)

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Making the Most of Technology and Tools

Jennifer Wilson is always so purposeful in her blogging. Her classroom will be 1:1 with technology this year and she starts the year by asking a wonderful question:

What place does pencil and paper have in my students’ learning and understanding of mathematics?

I am convinced that we need to pay attention to when we are asking, encouraging, and requiring students to use pencil and paper to create a record of what they are learning…so that students…have a better chance of remembering it later.

Starting the Year with Engaging Math Tasks

There have been some great suggestions recently regarding favourite math tasks and activities for getting class started on the right foot. Many teachers and students have already started the 2017-18 school year but there are many more that have yet to commence. Most public schools in Canada will have their first day of school during the first week in September. Check out the hashtags #mtbosfd (short for MTBoS First Day) and #myfavoritemathtaskis for ideas on how to start out the year.

Matthew Oldridge wrote a blog post titled First Day of September Problems in your Math Classroom with some suggestions for problems as well as why you might use them.  He asks, “Do you start with building class community, work on class norms or rules, or do you start with a good problem?” He suggests that starting with a rich mathematical problem signals to kids, “this is a problem-solving community” and “we think in this classroom.”

Whatever task you might use, I believe it should arouse your students’ curiosity, be accessible to all of your students, and generate discussion about different solving strategies. A favourite problem of mine that I believe meets these criteria is called The Four Coins Problem. “You’re creating a new coin system for your country. You must use only four coin values and you must be able to create the values 1 through 10 using one coin at a minimum and two coins maximum.” This problem is simple to state but has lots of opportunities for extension and discussion.

I hope you all have an amazing start back to school, refreshed and inspired for a great year ahead. A special welcome as well to teachers starting their very first year in the classroom with all the excitement and anxiety that this entails.

Written by Erick Lee (@TheErickLee)

More Talking = More Learning!

Sara VanDerWerf is at it again bringing us gems for starting up a new school year.  Her recent post, entitled STAND & TALKS. The Best Thing I Ever Did to Get Students Talking to One Another, is very thorough and includes a description of the routine, a sample scenario, and tons of examples of how she uses the routine as well as other routines she incorporates together with a Stand & Talk (S&T).

An example of a Stand & Talk used to introduce students to new vocabulary

Essentially, an S&T is a lot like Think, Pair, Share or Turn & Talk, but with the add-in that students stand and find a partner in another area of the room to discuss with before the task is given.  Sara says this gets nearly all students talking every time she uses it, and has the added bonus of a possible energy-injector in a stale classroom.

Three big goals Sara has in her classroom are accomplished by using this routine:

1. Getting students moving every class period

2. Getting students to notice the math first, before she says anything

3. De-fronting the classroom

Whatever your goals this upcoming school year, this routine seems to be one that will really go far to get students processing the mathematics as well as owning their learning.

Another must-read is an oldie but a goodie from Geoff Krall, found here.  Entitled Seven (Sneaky) Activities to Get Your Students Talking Mathematically, Geoff highlights some amazing activities that are sure to get discourse going in your classroom.

Happy Math!

Written by Matt Engle (@pickpocketsbme)