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Notice and Wonder: Division and Easter egg math

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Some of the best math is the math that happens organically, math born out of a need to answer a real-world question that has importance to the mathematician. Since Spring has officially sprung, naturally the meaningful math that is happening at our house revolves around plastic Easter eggs and the treats that go inside. The problem solving began with these materials below: Add caption My daughter is supposed to bring 12 filled Easter eggs for the Kindergarten Easter egg hunt this week, so the question that we wanted to answer was: If we want each egg to have the same amount of Smarties, how many packages of smarties will each egg get? Two powerful questions guided our conversation: I asked Cora what she noticed. "I noticed that there are 12 eggs because there are two bags of 6, and I noticed there are a lot of Smarties!" I then asked if she thought there were more or less than 12 packages. She thought about it for a brief moment and said with confidence, ...
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Rules vs. Norms

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As I reflect on teaching a week of summer school, I've been thinking about the difference between classroom rules and classroom norms. Before planning this week of instruction, I had never thought intentionally about the difference. In fact, I'm pretty sure I treated them like the same thing when I had my own classroom or at least thought that if I had rules, I didn't need norms and vice-versa. My last year in the classroom, I shifted to starting the year with "norms" instead of rules, but in retrospect, they were actually still rules... called norms. While rules and norms do have some things in common, they are are truly two different things that have effects on different dimensions of our classrooms. The intent of rules is to establish a safe and efficient learning environment and maintain some order to prevent chaos, while norms are about collectively deciding as a community how learning will happen - it seems to me that both are needed in all classrooms. ...
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Humanizing Math with #MathGals

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I'm honored to have been asked by Sam & Hema to be a keynote blogger for the conference. Make sure to catch up with all of the wonderful blogs, videos and tweets shared so far at  The Virtual Conference on Humanizing Mathematics . I've been thinking a lot lately about math as a  human  endeavor, and more specifically, how we humanize (read: make accessible, comfortable, welcoming to ALL people) a subject that has been historically considered a  masculine  endeavor. It's hard for me to wrap my head around the fact that a Google search for "famous mathematicians" in 2019 returns this slice of mostly old, dead, white-guy-centric history: Don't get me wrong. These (mostly) men above made fantastic, famous contributions to mathematics. But what baffles me is the glaring omission of the women who have made equally important and impressive impacts on the field. So, my act of humanizing mathematics is to change this narrative. Lately, I have been ...
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