Adventures in Math

Tonight was officially the last class of the semester teaching my first math methods course. I have lots of feelings about this... a sense of accomplishment and relief among them. It was a hard semester, y'all. I poured my heart and soul into these 34 (34!!!) men and women who are on their way to becoming teachers, and I am so proud of *most* of how it all played out.  Overall, I feel really positive about how I organized and implemented the course, but like many professionals, I tend to have some symptoms of imposter syndrome alongside the feelings of pride and excitement. The first time one of my students called me Professor I almost ugly-laughed right in his face - me!? A professor?! Surely I'm not important enough to be called that. But as I consider the reflections my students shared with me this afternoon in a finals week fro-yo shop office hours session, my feelings of inadequacy are slowly subsiding as they are replaced with a bit of disappointment... not in myself or m

I had the amazing honor of being asked to do an Ignite Talk at the NCSM Annual Conference this year in San Antonio. If you're unfamiliar with the format of Ignite, here's a crash course: 10 speakers, each get 5 minutes and 20 auto-advancing slides. Terrifying? Yes. Exhilarating? That too. Ignite speakers are asked to speak about something they're passionate about - something that "ignites" them. I chose to speak about privileging precision over perfection as we listen to and support students' mathematical ideas. Here's what I wanted to say (and here's the video link where you can watch what I actually said under pressure - ha!) My mom tells a story about me when I was 3 years old. I was drawing her a picture with what she describes as “meticulousness”, drawing each band of the rainbow carefully, precisely, with the colors in the “correct” order, whatever that is.  All of a sudden, she saw me grab a black c