As I await to schedule my doctoral defense, I’m preparing a bit of a lofty goal this Spring. I’d like to write and submit five journal articles. Three of them will be based on my dissertation, one will be from a data set I didn’t use in my dissertation, and another would be based on something else entirely. So I’m perusing all the math, education, and math education journals to find a potential home for my articles. And a good number of them are promoting their call for articles in a Special Issue devoted to A.I. in education. And because published articles are outright currency in higher ed ..read more

It takes a while to learn a topic; it takes longer to remember what it was like to not know a topic. As the semester winds down and the weather turns from chilly to just Cold and Dark, my friends and family and I will most certainly be grabbing tabletop games, new and old, and spending countless hours board gaming.  At no point am I more flummoxed as a teacher than when I’m explaining the rules of a board game to a newbie. What is innate and second nature to me is total gobbledygook for the novice. Moreover, I can see and hear the confusion in my audience more evidently when they’re sitti ..read more

This semester I taught College Algebra and Developmental Math at a community college. Being new to the institution, I mostly hewed to the standards and progressions and textbooks from prior iterations of the course taught by more tenured faculty. However, I did make one significant change: the graphing calculator. While previous iterations of the course required students to have a TI-83 or similar calculator, I opted to utilize Desmos as our graphing tool. My primary reason is that it’s free. My secondary reason is that the graphs the tool creates are interactive (updating in realtime) and vis ..read more

While I intend to make a longer, “My Semester with Desmos” post in the near future, I wanted to prime the pump by writing about the saving grace of the Activity Builder feature in Amplify’s Desmos platform: the ability to create self-checking exercises. I’ll have plenty to discuss on why I’m calling this the “saving grace” because while there were a lot of positives in using AB for College Algebra and Developmental Math, there are a few massive drawbacks. But, according to my students, the self-checking features (which I had to learn to code as the semester went along) were a huge boon. There ..read more

I am rereading Liping Ma’s Knowing and Teaching Elementary Mathematics for a class. It’s an exceptional book; I’d put it on the Mount Rushmore of books about math education (that might be a post for another day). For those who haven’t read it, the book is an exploration of elementary math instruction in the U.S. and China. It was published in 1999, but it doesn’t feel outdated whatsoever. And it laid the groundwork for a lot of the high quality routines that are emergent now. I’m not going to recap the book, but I would like to tug on one thread: the necessity of more math for pre-service and ..read more

In 2019, North Carolina attempted to push through a bill that would force trans individuals to use the bathroom of their sex assigned at birth, rather than their current gender. It was only a few years ago, but there was mass outrage in a way that seems unthinkable today. Most notably, the National Basketball Association threatened to pull their annual all-star game. Eventually, thanks to the efforts of the NBA, other organizations, and public pressure, North Carolina lawmakers relented and repealed the bathroom part of their bill.  This year, the Mathematical Association of America (MAA ..read more

This post is for all you Italian BMT heads out there. For the month of April 2023, Subway customers have the option of purchasing a “Subway Footlong Pass” for $15. You then get 50% off all (I think) Subway sandwiches for the month (digital orders only). Purchase YourFootlong Pass NowPurchase a $15 Pass and get 50% Off one Footlong per day during the entire month of April. Limited passes available. Must be a Subway MyWay® Rewards member to purchase. Discount is redeemable only in the Subway® App or online. Please don’t look down on me, but I get Subway kinda every-so-often. There’s one within ..read more

As you may have heard, adults don’t need or use math. One can be a successful human without being a successful math learner. In fact, most adolescents and young adults will stop taking mathematics as soon as their school no longer requires them to do so. So why do we force adolescents and young adults to take the math that they do? You’ve also probably heard the question “when are we going to use this?” Similar questions include, “is this important?” and “is this on the test?” These questions bum me out, but they do deserve answers. I hope that most disciplines wrestle with these fundamental q ..read more

In between teaching math and where I’m at today – in the final year of a PhD program in math education – I obtained a master’s degree…. in atmospheric science. Makes perfect sense right? I won’t bore you the details, but my reasoning was that I’ve always been interested in weather and climate and I wanted to try something different before I settled into a career wholly in education (which, once I graduated, ended up happening). Atmospheric science research, as you can probably imagine, is an entirely quantitative field. My research thesis involved running models of tropical cyclones under diff ..read more

We’ve all seen the reports about the looming teacher shortage. Some projections say without some sort of seachange in the education landscape hundreds of thousands of teacher vacancies will go unfilled. Unfilled teacher vacancies result in long term subs (of which there are also shortages), uncredentialed teachers, and generally just a Warm Body to monitor children. In such cases, schools will no doubt rely on a digitized curriculum so kids don’t fall too far behind. It won’t be anyone’s Plan A or even Plan B, but when you’re looking at multiple teacher vacancies and no one to fill them, educa ..read more