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True Confessions from a Math Teacher!

Math Residue and Wheels

I think it goes without saying that the #MTBoS is an amazing community. Nowhere else in education have I heard of a place where elementary, middle, high, and post-secondary teachers hang out to learn from one another.  This week Alex Overwijk (a high school teacher) shared a post about radians. Here’s the truth, I’m an elementary teacher at heart and I had no idea what a radian was…but I do now.  

I get intimidated and lost in some of the posts our friends outside K-8 share, but I read on because I know it leaves residue. The math residue makes the understanding of future posts I read much easier to digest.  

What I love most about Alex’s post is that he makes the math accessible to both his students and readers.  Alex walks us through his 5 days of learning and shares pictures of hands on learning that would make any elementary school principal proud. Did I mention that Alex teaches high school!

If you teach radians, great! You can use Alex’s lessons.



If you don’t teach radians (like me), great!  I’m sure you’ll walk away with residue sticking to your brain. Just be sure to tell Al thanks.



Written by Graham Fletcher (@gfletchy)

I Know Dan Meyer Doesn’t Need My Help…

..but you should check this out – cross-posted on both dy/dan and the Desmos blog – features from Desmos called the Classroom Conversation Toolkit, which allows a teacher to control the pacing of a Desmos Activity.  Desmos Activities are awesome, to be sure, but they can create a roomful of plugged-in children.  The Toolkit counteracts that one potential downside by providing teachers with a means to pause, anonymize, and share contributions by students, and giving space for some lovely ‘collective effervescence’.

Dave Sabol, over at The Rational Radical, has been running a series called This is How I Teach, riffing on the How I Work series at lifehacker.  Each participant answers the same series of questions, and then tags whomever they would like to hear about.  Even if you know someone, or have been reading their blog for years, there are insights to be gained from reading about how others manage their teaching practice.  I personally was quite heartened to read that at least three participants used some sort of favorite pad as their ‘favorite to-do list manager’.  

Maybe you know about wild.maths.org already, but I just learned about it via a post on Algebra’s Friend about Factors and Multiples Chain, a great pre-factoring activity.  A cousin of nrich (another wonderful task and activity resource), wild.maths is dedicated to creative explorations of math, and is chock full of interactives.   This website is a rabbit hole worth exploring – I mean, they have a section called Dotty Grids!

Finally, some mathematical art:  Rafael Araujo is a Venezuelan architect and illustrator whose artwork is geometrically constructed, much of it using the Golden Ratio.  He leaves the construction lines in his pieces, which serve to enhance and highlight their mathematical and aesthetic beauty.



Written by Wendy Menard (@wmukluk)

How Often…

How often do you look at student work with other teachers, only to have the conversation turn to student deficits? “This kid can’t subtract.” “That kid’s handwriting is atrocious.” Kim VanDuzer wrote about this phenomenon in her recent post, First Blog Post. In an impressive first foray into blogging, Kim describes how she experienced this among other teachers, and in herself. She traced it back to the idea that some teachers operate from a  “deficit perspective.” Teachers’ focus on deficits aligns with the traditional view of teachers as “Givers of knowledge.” Kim admits to falling into this perspective as well, but she goes on to talk about how she shifted her perspective and provides links to some relevant resources.



How often have you questioned the man? More specifically, how often have your students had a chance to analyze “REAL life products and company promotions”? If you want to dive into these kinds of tasks, then you should follow what happens over at getmadmath.weebly.com. Jen McAleer has been curating a collection of tasks that can get kids thinking about estimation and problem solving while also questioning the world around them. The picture above is from the task Starburst Mini-Gate, a task that asks students to analyze the serving size on the label versus in the bag.



How often have you heard of a student actually wanting their mom to work in their school? Hedge’s recent post, Following Danielson’s advice: “Find What You Love… Do More Of That…” recalls how her son made that exact request and what her son said next that brought her to tears. It’s the cutest thing ever! She goes to explain more about her decision to return to the classroom, mentioning Christopher Danielson’s speech from Twitter Math Camp ‘15, and the rest of the #MTBoS. Expect to see more of her writing and reflecting about the goings on in her classroom.



Written by Carl Oliver (@carloliwitter)

Online Professional Development Sessions

It Came From the #MTBoS

Knitting – a Math Teacher Superpower?!?

This article was shared with me by a friend on Facebook – that friend being Scott Delahunt, aka @MorganBallantin. It’s a fascinating read about how math teachers have greatly facilitated the visualization of highly complex shapes by using their knitting needles. An interesting bit of history – Richard Feynman seems to have been the first to notice how knitting can be used to teach math! The article has plenty of links if you want to drill deeper, including this one about an afghan, knit by Pat Ashforth and Steve Plummer, that teaches the multiplication tables – so it’s not just the hyperbolic planes or the Möbius bands that can be rendered with needles. I used to know how to crochet…maybe it’s time to dust those needles off!

Written by Audrey McLaren (@a_mcsquared)

The Secret of the Desmos Activity Builder Guide

If you’ve been nervous about exploring the capabilities of the Desmos Activity Builder, now is the time to jump in. The Activity Builder is a wonderful platform that provides teachers with enormous flexibility, and it can be used from elementary math (plotting fractions on a number line) to calculus (derivatives of a unicycle’s motion).

To help you get started,  Dan Meyer has written a guide to creating great digital activities. Secretly, though, it’s just a great guide for creating activities of any sort. Imagine this post as a summary of Dan’s advice and philosophy over the past 5 years or so. Dan hasn’t given a TED talk in a while, but this post could probably act as his outline.

Written by Kent Haines (@KentHaines)

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Great Blogging Action

Cathy Is On Fire

If you’ve never tuned into Cathy Yenca’s blog, carve out a few hours and get plugged in. Recently, she’s been on fire with some great posts, ideas, and a plethora of Desmos activities. Here are two post recaps:

Classroom & Twitter Hodge-Podge

Cathy always expresses her gratitude for the #MTBoS and this post is no exception, ranging from student playlists to Explain Everything to Desmos. As I said, she’s on fire building some amazing Desmos activities. Add this link to your bookmarks and check out her List.ly.

5 Practices in a 1:1 Classroom

Cathy gives us some simple tips on ways to use digital tools and student work to extend the power of NCTM’s 5 Practices for Orchestrating Productive Mathematics Discussions. In addition to monitoring student work, Cathy is excited to “see and analyze student work/thinking outside of class.” allowing her to see student mistakes and misconceptions. Even after 15 years of teaching she came across a new mistake. That’s exciting! I highly recommend you check out the rest of her blog post here.

Enjoy!

~by Andrew Stadel (@mr_stadel)

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Wanting to do ALL THE {math teacher} THINGS!

Inspiration for the School Year

Here in New York, school doesn’t begin until Thursday (September 8), so I have the advantage of reading about how everyone else begins their school year, making my to-do and to-implement lists ever longer.  As always, there is some tremendous intentional and reflective work going on in the Math Blogosphere.

For example, Anna Blinstein, over at BorshctwithAnna, has written about a Habits of Mind unit that she is doing with her 9th graders – a great use of instructional routines to establish classroom norms and expectations.

In the ‘Make Your Ideal Classroom’ department, John Berray gives step-by-step instructions in turning your classroom tables into whiteboard surfaces!  (I’ve already written my Donorschoose proposal for the supplies.)

 

Tina Cardone rethought her homework strategy for the coming year, and has come up with a plan which provides spiraling practice in one type of assignment, and addresses broader goals of social justice, student voice and critical thinking in another, more-extended type of assignment.  By hooking her students with prompts that are designed to elicit both opinions and mathematical thinking, Tina is creating a space in which students can connect math with real world experiences.

My colleagues in NYC are doing some great pre-year reflecting as well. Matt Baker breaks down his starting routines for the coming year, which are closely aligned to his teaching goals.  These routines include high 5’s and warm-ups designed to help his students take better notes and understand the goal and sequence of lessons.  Brian Palacio, about to begin teaching at a new school, takes a major look in the teaching mirror, looking both forward and back. It’s a great piece, one that led me to reflect on my own career.

Two math and social justice notes:  Do you follow Jessica Hagy’s blog Indexed?  You probably should, for her wonderful graphs, like this:

And you might want to read Cathy O’Neil’s (mathbabe.org) book, Weapons of Math Destruction, about the mathematical models by which financial decisions are made and personal futures controlled.   Evelyn Lamb reviewed this important book here.

Written by Wendy Menard (@wmukluk)

Finding Your Teacher Mojo

We’re off to a pretty good school year, MTBoS. Take a look at some of the excellent things going on in so many different classrooms.

#MTBoSBlaugust came to a close last week, but not before at least one more inspiring blog post. Elissa Miller’s post Guys I’m Killing it talks about how in the few weeks back at school, she’s confident she’s got her “teacher mojo back.”

Matt Vaudrey has his “teacher mojo working,” and he’s been beginning each post about the topic with the opening line “Dear Claire,…”. Each is a letter to Claire Verti, whose classes he is covering until she returns from maternity leave. The posts are full of Matt’s enthusiasm and insight as he returns from being a coach/author to teaching. The most recent post Visual Patterns – 2 describes some teacher “Trolling,” while referencing Fawn Nguyen’s fantastic First Two Days post.

If you aren’t yet convinced that this is off to a great start, check out Brian Bushart’s post More Than Words. The post begins by discussing Tracy Zager’s post How Not To Start Math Class in The Fall which talks about how a mandated test set a bad tone for the year. Later in the post, Brian describes how a group of elementary teachers in his district who worked on math in the summer have begun their year blogging about the start to their school year. Their uplifting first posts are listed in the post’s last paragraph and are sure excite you about this school year’s potential.



Written by Carl Oliver (@carloliwitter)