Online Professional Development Sessions

GMD is Looking for Presenters!

Do you know someone who you think should lead a GMD Webinar?

Did you see something amazing at a recent conference that needs to be shared?

At Global Math we are proud of our Webinars!  We appreciate all of our presenters and look forward to bringing you the best “PD Iin Your Pajamas” on the internet.  We’re always on the lookout for fresh faces and new ideas.

Please use this recommendation form to let us know who/what should be shared next!  We will take your recommendations and reach out to try to make it happen!

In next week’s webinar Frank Wapole and Evan Borkowski will be here to challenge us to rethink Math homework.  You can get more info on the session and register here.

You can always check out past Global Math Department webinars. Click here for the archives or get the webinars in podcast form!

From the World of Math Ed…

Much Ado About Taxes

In recent weeks, the media has been abuzz with talk of tax rates. Most visible has been the headlines surrounding Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s talk of increasing the top marginal tax rate to 70%. This news has sparked much debate from all sides of the political spectrum. But regardless of your political beliefs, it’s been illuminating to witness the conversations and, in some cases, misunderstandings surrounding the system of income taxation in the United States.

So what’s this got to do with the math ed community? Well, if there was ever a moment for us to shine, this is it!

First up, Dan Meyer has written a blog post with some ideas and resources for helping our students understand marginal taxation. Dan also mentions an amazing collaboration between the New York Times Learning Network and the American Statistical Association called What’s Going on in This Graph? and, even better, Desmos teacher activities that enable teachers to have these conversations through the Desmos platform.

Click on the image below for some people to follow on Twitter:

Here are some books to read by Black authors;

1. White Rage by Carol Anderson (Thanks again to Val Brown for leading rich discussions on #ClearTheAir.)
2. PUSHOUT by Monique W Morris EdD

See Morris’ Retweet with 100 books by Black women authors (image is link):

Finally, if you are teaching about Math History check out Mathematically Gifted and Black.

Contributions compiled by Diana McClean (@teachMcClean)

Try this: close your eyes, and think of an open number line. You just need to picture a line, no intervals marked, just a certain amount of space. That line will have a length, although it is difficult to tell how long your mental image of this line is.

We know this line could stretch from some starting point, to infinity, or rather to some infinite length, which we cannot measure. We could mark an infinite number of points on this line, and actually, we could mark two different types of infinity on this line: counting numbers, and real numbers, which are demonstrably at a higher level on the “tower of infinity”.

But we are getting ahead of ourselves.

Close your eyes, and picture a line of length 10 units. Hold up your hands however long you think that line should be.

Now open them. Where are your hands?

Try the same exercise for 20. Where are your hands?

Here is an interesting tweet thread about some experiences I had working on number lines with grade ones. My colleague asked them to visualize 20.

Consider trying this with your students. Whether “shoulder width” is a preferred human length for number lines is an open question. Perhaps “body scale” is most relatble to us humans.

If you want to blow their minds, ask them to draw an open line of some length, mark 0 and one million as the ends. Where is 1000? Now do the same for one billion. Where is one million?

Space and number are mysteriously connected. As I understand the research, we know they are connected, there is no doubt, we just don’t really know how.

Work is being done in this area. See the pre-print in this tweet below, and consider reading it. Zach Hawes and Daniel Ansari are working on what happens in the brain to connect space and number. Basically, there is an emerging body of evidence that spatial reasoning and thinking about numbers are connected, as shown by fMRI mapping of the regions of the brain responsible for each.

Research continues, seeking to find this “missing link”. In the meantime, an open number line is a tool “with legs” in grade 1-12 education. (Typically, Kindergarten students aren’t quite ready to go past concrete counting objects, ten frames, and on to the number line).

Written by Matthew Oldridge (@MatthewOldridge)

Online Professional Development Sessions

The #MTBoS Never Sleeps

Drop Everything and Math

I saw this tweet from my friend Alecia Ford (@AleciaHiggFord) talking about how Madison Knowe (@knowemath) had a list of questions in her classroom and the last question was “What would the math equivalent of drop everything and read time look like?”

This has been a question on my mind a lot this year as we implemented “silent sustained reading” (SSR) time in my school. I was a little jealous and have been considering ways that we could potentially help students have this same relationship with math. So I posed the question back to Alecia. This was her response:

Then Madison weighed in with the ways she has been trying to incorporate it more in her own classroom with this tweet:

I love the idea of a “math play toolbox” and having games and puzzles as well as math books. And then Joel (@joelbezaire) offered up a newsletter from Kent Haines (@KentHaines) and a few games (Cat Stack and Manifolds) to pick up as a starting point.

How about y’all? What strategies have you tried to be able to have “drop everything and math” time as part of your school day? How do your students respond to this idea?

Amber Thienel
@amberthienel

[Editor’s Note: If you want to read more on the phrase “drop everything and math,” check out this Tracy Zager’s (@TracyZager) post.]

A New Form of Flashcards

Tired of traditional flashcards? Me too! That’s why I was excited to see Berkeley Everett’s (@BerkeleyEverett) Math Flips resource. Rather than having a question on one side and the solution on the other like a traditional flashcard, Math Flips have an exercise on one side and a related exercise example on the other. For example:

Berkeley’s purpose for this is to promote relational understanding rather than answer-getting. I love this progression of questions:

He credits other math educators including Chrissy Newell, who created a number talk with two related problems and the question sequence “How many? How do you know?” and “How many NOW? How do you know?”, Annie Fetter and Joe Schwartz, who say “Ask about ideas, not answers,” and the amazing number sense routines shared by Steve Wyborney (www.stevewyborney.com). He invites YOU to send ideas/feedback to Berkeley (email or Twitter) or make your own.

Berkeley has many downloadable flashcards. Try them out and let us know what you think.

Howie Hua
@howie_hua