For my post today I wanted to get an idea of the people who are also doing the #MTBoS30 thing that was started by @sophgermain a few weeks ago. If you are in the middle of the challenge, or if you want to recommend some of the posts from other bloggers, fill out this quick survey (10 questions, plus some optional ones). Once you get done scroll down to scroll through the results of others.
Scroll to the the right in the window below to see all of the responses.
14/30 #MTBoS
This Saturday I wanted to do a little trip around the blogosphere to look for things to blog about. As much as this blog is about documenting my growth as a teacher, this blog should provide a space to document what I am learning from other people. This week I felt like learned a lot from a number of things I read, but when it was time to get a post up, these are the ones that stuck out in my head:
@trianglemancsd has been going through the questions from the ‘Grant Wiggins Challenge’, and has produced a set of great posts that quickly challenge the depth with whcih I thought about the mentioned topics. I was really interested in the third question, where Wiggins’ asked about the often-memorized, rarely-conceptualized, ‘same-change-flip’ algorithm for division of fractions. Danielson’s response introduced the words partitive and quotative division into my vocabulary and led me on a fascinating trip down a mathematical rabbit hole which could rival a graduate class.
Also interesting is that Grant Wiggins himself shows up in the posts, creating a pretty interesting and cordial conversation (their interactions stop far short of a Public Intellectual Death Math).
@mythagon created the cutest video about (not) grading math assignments and there is really know way you can’t watch it. It was based off of an article that I had read before and forgot when the school year started, that I was happy to rediscover. I was disappointed that I was in the middle of grading when I watched it, as it made me instantly want to change my practice.
@sophgermain, the gauntlet-thrower-downer of the 30 day math blog challenge did a quite proper round up of #MTBoS30 posts, which you are better off just checking out for yourself.
8/30 #MTBoS30
Today was the first day back after intensives, which means it was my first day of teaching the newest incarnation of “Banking and Investing.” I’ve loved this class since I started teaching it in 2011, just a few years after the credit crisis forced thousands to be confused about just what exactly caused the credit crisis. While the past 3 years of teaching this eight week course allows me to have it down to a science, there is a still a panic inducing moment before I start heading down to the first session where I FREAK OUT! All of a sudden rapid mental leaps between old dropbox folders and google search results takes place while saying otherwise unspeakable things about the stupid printer and of course the intermittent spurts of self-loathing and anger at all of the new concepts and ideas that didn’t get fleshed out. It’s like my mind crams the entire weekend before a new school year into my free period after lunch.
Today was the same panic session, including a first-ever bang of my head against the wall in an unintentional nod to Kevin Garnett. Then, after running down the stairs like a crazy person, I saw the classroom full of kids at 2:45 and realized what I should have realized long ago. “This is not my class..” In the ‘fog of education’ I forgot that PM school starts at 3:15, and I actually had half an hour before class started! The remaining adrenaline in my system rushed me back to my desk before I had enough time to take a deep breath and think about what this really meant. I had an extra half an hour before class to make any changes that I wanted. I have an extra half hour. It felt like I was watching the TV in my sleepwear as the Chancellor calls a snow day. What do I do with this extra half an hour? I’ll tell you what I’d did with my extra half hour, but I’m really curious to hear what you would do with one of your own.
So I was reading on the internet about this 30 day challenge and a number of things popped into my head.
You can only let an idea bounce around in your head so many times before you need to either act on it, so I decided to act. Over the next month I’ll be explaining more about my upcoming “Equations and Patterns” Unit, the final “Carnival Project”, and my ambitious plans to teach and assess it better than I have the last 5 times I taught it. Should be a good month!
2/30
2014 NCTM Annual Meeting and Exposition
This year’s annual meeting took place one short drunken stumble away from Bourbon Street at the New Orleans conference center. The entire space was used by the NCTM conference, and they still had sessions hidden away in deep recesses of the center as well as in the Hilton which was a onerous 5 minute walk down the street. Selecting talks at this event was a constant struggle between dozens of excellent speakers. The best algorithm that I found to choose which talks to go to was to attend the talks that people smarter than you recommended. Using this method, and a little ‘phonebook’-style searching, I ended up attending and learning from the following talks. After three action packed days I came away with a lot of ideas, and a lot of notes, but nothing really concrete. So in order to squeeze every little bit of learning out of the experience I am going to write up as many talks as I can remember here on the blog.
This talk had a number of situations that push students to think deeply about solving problems and making connections between the ways you can solve problems. For example, slide 2 shows a problem that students can understand as a visual problem or as a problem that can be dealt with by adding the pattern of odd numbers. He went on to show how a generalization of this problem could be expanded to larger squares, (but the slides shared on the NCTM website don’t seem to have all of the things that he talked about). The connection between a geometric representation of something that can be expressed with an equation was the big concept and slides 3 and 4 show two geometry problems that can have similar math connections and produced genuine “Aha’s” from the crowd of math educators.
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