Adventures in Math

*For Part 1 of this summer school blog series, go here ! Norm 2: We give every task a try. In May, I attended YouCubed's  Teaching Mindset Mathematics  workshop at Stanford with some colleagues with the plan to implement their summer school curriculum for our summer school program. Having a curriculum with a focus on developing positive attitudes towards math, collaboration and openness felt like a nice fit for a four-week program that wasn't focused on credit recovery. The tasks we did at the workshop gave us a chance to get messy with math, put our heads together with thoughtful group members, and made us giddy imagining how the students we'd be teaching would fall in love with math done "this way". How naive of us! As you can imagine, not every task landed exactly how we had imagined. It turns out, it's not enough to open tasks. There's always a lot of buzz about the nature of the tasks we put in front of students, with a tendency towards (suggesti...

On June 4, I walked into a classroom that was mine, if only for a short-term, for the first time in four years. I had spent hours planning activities, lessons, tasks, and experiences for the 40 rising 7th graders I'd have in my two 2-hour periods of summer school math. These students attend a local middle school in the lowest performing district in our county, and some were "invited" to summer school based on demonstrated academic need, while others had opted in for something to do on the 100+ degree days of June. I knew it was going to be hard. A combination of my short-term tenure (2 weeks) and the lack of any real incentive for students to attend or engage (no credit recovery for 7th graders) in their courses set me up with pretty low expectations, not of the students, but of the impact I'd be able to make for them. In addition to being the teacher of record for two weeks, part of my role was also to support observing teachers from this school. The idea was that th...

I just returned from #TMC18 in Cleveland. My head and my heart are full, and I’m so tired I can barely function, but I’m also strangely energized. Friends who had encouraged me to attend kept telling me how “different” TMC is than other conferences. I couldn’t imagine that it’d feel that different, and I honestly don’t dislike the big conference feel, but I had high hopes for #TMC18. It wasn’t until Saturday that I really started processing how TMC is “different”. Sure, there are the surface level differences – the varying session structures, (6 hour sessions over 3 mornings, hour and half-hour long talks, My Favorites and flex sessions), or the venue (a school campus, with amazing hosts), or the visible cell phone presence (it is “Twitter” Math Camp, after all). But there were some more significant differences that I don’t think I was prepared for that have me counting down the days until #TMC19 (In my neck of the woods! Woohoo!) Never before have I attended a conference wher...