Learning to Fold
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Math is my love. Folding is my zen. I used to teach at a suburban high school North of Seattle. I now live in a less-populated region of beautiful Maine where I work as a mathematics consultant
Learning to Fold
4y ago
Woo, blogging! As I start work on high school curriculum, I thought I would go back and revisit the grade 8 units that I’ve spent the past 18 months working on and share some of my favorite things. This gives me a chance to think about what sorts of things I really want to keep in mind as I write new stuff and gives folks a way to take a peek “under the hood” at how some activities came about. A new curriculum can be a daunting thing to jump into, so hopefully this is a friendly way to dip toes in. Let’s start in grade 8, unit 1, shall we? Oh, and some of the links are going to be to the onlin ..read more
Learning to Fold
4y ago
So now you’re in your classroom and getting students to talk is akin to squeezing rocks for water because math. Mathematics is serious business, no? But what if the quiet of the classroom is tearing at your soul? Sure, they’ll respond when you pull out a popsicle stick with their name on it, but the hesitation you see in Adelaide’s answer doesn’t make sense when you know she’ll have her friends in stitches the moment the bell rings. How do you break through this miasma of reserve that settles over the room at the ring of the bell?
Enter Laila Nur, stage center. If you missed her Ignite a ..read more
Learning to Fold
4y ago
For those on the twitters and reading blogs, there was a nice build up in advertising to this event. I really didn’t know what to expect from Shadow Con until the day before when I got to ask some folks that were speaking at it during the math games night. The ‘TED-esque, but with a call-to-action’ description ended up being most spot on for me. This was probably one of my favorite events from my time in Boston and I greatly enjoyed each speaker. Let me tell you why.
I declared Tracy my new lunch buddy for when I make the drive between Mount Desert Island, ME and Salem, MA last fall. We got ..read more
Learning to Fold
4y ago
Wow was I torn about what session to attend at 12:30 on Thursday. I ended up going this route since I’ve been poking (slowly–every so slowly) at the book Visual Complex Analysis by Tristan Needham, which came highly recommended by a mathematician friend of mine when I voiced wanting to learn more about Complex Analysis.
You know a session is pretty awesome when the person sitting behind you lets out a genuine “Holy sh*t!” when he sees the path the presenters have set us on. For those deciphering my color-coding above, blue = Michael Pershan, orange = Max Ray (like that was a choice), and green ..read more
Learning to Fold
4y ago
Geoff Krall, who has posted all the things from his talk over on his blog, lead a session Thursday on thinking about how to adapt the tasks you have. Due to the work I do for Illustrative Mathematics, adapting tasks is something I think about a lot and something IM does with teachers at PD conferences frequently so it was great hearing Geoff’s perspective of the Why, How, and What of task adaptation.
First big point was made that textbooks by nature are generic. They have to have wide accessibility with respect to contexts used and be for teachers/students of a large range of abilities ..read more
Learning to Fold
4y ago
Through coincidence I met Anthony Rodiguez the previous week in Chicago at an unrelated meeting and while exchanging our session titles I realized he was already on my calendar for NCTM Boston. After getting to spend a few days with him in Chicago I was looking forward to this session even more as Anthony has an enthusiastic and grounding presence and I really want to spend some time picking his brain over a meal.
In addition to the odd coincidence of meeting Anthony in Chicago, on April 15th the Tampa Bay Times published the article “Mythbusters’ star: Bring back band, shop class if you want ..read more
Learning to Fold
4y ago
I always enjoy a good Ignite talk so I headed to the NCSM one after dropping things off at the MTBoS booth. This was my first attempt at live sketchnoting, and wow is an Ignite a trial by fire with how fast some of the presenters talk! If you’ve not seen an Ignite before, you can catch video from prior ones here. My sketchnotes and thoughts below the cut.
What Makes a Good Math Curriculum?
I remember Annie Fetter doing some tweeting of questions from a pre-service teacher a while back, so it was neat to see it come together in this Ignite. I’ve definitely come around to her “No” for the quest ..read more
Learning to Fold
4y ago
Quick Links to Sketchnote posts from NCTM 2015:
NCSM Ignite
Project Based Learning — Anthony Rodriguez — @altomexicano
Adaptation — Geoff Krall — @emergentmath
Contexts for Complex Numbers — Michael Pershan & Max Ray — @mpershan & @maxmathforum
[pending] Shadowcon Part 1, Part 2, Part 3
[pending] How do Your Materials Rate — Jason Zimba — @achievethecore
[pending] Fake World Math — Dan Meyer — @ddmeyer
[pending] Transforming Practice — Elham Kazemi, Allison Hintz, Lynsey Gibbons — @ekazemi, @allisonhintz124, @lynseymathed
[pending] Reasoning Revision Revolution — Patrick Callahan & ..read more
Learning to Fold
4y ago
While my grades in Algebra 1 and 2 may lead one to believe I knew what was going on, those classes were agonizing for me. I can still vividly remember the frustration I felt because nothing seemed to make any sense and my ability to memorize steps is sub-par. To this day I find it easier to remember only the formula for the volume of a sphere and then use calculus to find the formula for surface area rather than actually memorize to formula for surface area.
Strange, I know. But it works for me.
In my last post I was thinking about what it’s like to not know something. But in addition to not k ..read more
Learning to Fold
4y ago
If you ever see my desk you will find a bunch of sticky notes. They are not reminders so much as errant thoughts and little quotes I like enough to write down to ponder while I avoid over work. In example:
“He doesn’t get mad when things are hard. He just works. And I think that’s something I don’t have and not enough people do have.” – John Green on his brother, Hank
Yesterday I was looking through the app from Cuethink and admiring how it seems focused on getting students to communicate their mathematical understanding. Many of the things I enjoy most in the math sphere involve articu ..read more