Vermont Math Leadership Council

the view from my porch

Vermont has a new education organization - Vermont Math Leadership Council - thanks to Julie Conrad, Tracy Watterson and others for getting it off the ground. Thanks to me we have a blog with the easy URL vermontmathleadership.org. Thanks to Tim Whiteford, there is a bunch of great posts on the blog! Check it out. We’d like to get more material from more voices on this blog and increase our readership. Anyone can join the organization. Our next meeting is January 29, 2014.

I was about to post something here on my blog about the new Institute of Education Sciences Educator’s Practice Guide called Teaching Math to Young Children. But then I saw that Tim beat me to it by posting about the very same thing on the VMLC blog. So, read his post here.

What I like about this publication is that it helps both rookies and veterans understand how best to work with young children and math. There are clear, specific recommendations that are easy to follow and a selection of easily usable games and ideas that illustrate the concept.

Whereas we often encounter activities or lessons and need to figure out what math we’re really going for, this resource communicates the math goals clearly and first, then hands us the activity to use.

Stereotypes about Math

In our new technological world, employers do not need people who can calculate correctly or fast, they need people who can reason about approaches, estimate and verify results, produce and interpret different powerful representations, and connect with other people’s mathematical ideas.

The Stereotypes About Math That Hold Americans Back, By Jo Boaler. The Atlantic, November 12, 2013. 

Breathe collaboration

From Dan Meyer's You Pour I Choose Math Task

Steve Leinwand came to Killington, Vermont, on Wednesday night and I made sure I was there to see him. Dinner and the presentation by Steve was hosted by the fledgling local chapter of National Council of Supervisors of Mathematics (NCSM) called Vermont Math Leadership Council (VMLC). I made them a website at www.vermontmathleadership.org, where you can find resources shared by Steve, including his powerpoint from the dinner.

Here are a few things from the notes I typed on my iPad instead of eating dinner:

Take risks, make mistakes. The stuff we have now is bad. Enter the Common Core. Hope and change have arrived, like the calvary. This is a once in a lifetime opportunity to rescue ourselves and our teachers from all the problems we have had.

Effective teachers create language rich classrooms.

Effective teachers take every opportunity to build number sense.

Effective teachers embed math content and connect to the real world.

Effective teachers devote the last 5 minutes to formative assessment.

See Steve’s document called High Leverage Mathematics Instruction Practices for more.

I am not an effective leader if I don't breathe collaboration.

NYT: How to Fall in Love With Math

From WolframMathWorld

From yesterday’s New York Times Opinion Pages piece by mathematics professor Manil Suri.

Despite what most people suppose, many profound mathematical ideas don’t require advanced skills to appreciate. One can develop a fairly good understanding of the power and elegance of calculus, say, without actually being able to use it to solve scientific or engineering problems.

Think of it this way: you can appreciate art without acquiring the ability to paint, or enjoy a symphony without being able to read music. Math also deserves to be enjoyed for its own sake, without being constantly subjected to the question, “When will I use this?”

Letting Go

By Mica Angela Hendricks and daughter

My dear friend, Rachel Wynne, kindly emailed me the link I am about to share. It’s a blog post called “Collaborating with a Four-Year Old”. I just love it. It’s about a mom and her young daughter creating artwork together. The pictures are priceless, and the ideas about sharing and collaboration are profound.

“Those things you hold so dear cannot change and grow and expand unless you loosen your grip on them a little.” - Mica Angela Hendricks, The Busy Mockingbird

Stanford University: How to Learn Math

Image from Geometry Daily.

I can’t say enough about how fantastic Jo Boaler’s online math class was. I finished it yesterday.

Jo is a Stanford University professor, and she created a free, online class for teachers and parents called How to Learn Math. Students (there were approximately 35,000 people registered) watched videos, wrote responses to prompts, and completed other tasks at their own pace. Some are still finishing; the course ends September 28.

Jo is working on a course for young people now. She has published a book called What’s Math Got To Do With It. I’m convinced that whatever Jo does in the future, it will be great. Keep an eye on her.

In a nutshell, Jo is all about dispelling myths about who is good at math and who isn’t, evangelizing about the growth mindset work of Carol Dweck, and giving teachers ideas about effective math education. She advocates for math as an inquiry activity, and really seeing it in a totally different way than most of us were taught in school and continue to teach today.

In Jo’s words:

Mathematics classrooms should be places where students believe:

• Everyone can do well in math.
• Mathematics problems can be solved with many different insights and methods.
• Mistakes are valuable, they encourage brain growth and learning.
• Mathematics will help them in their lives, not because they will see the same types of problems in the real world but because they are learning to think quantitatively and abstractly and developing an inquiry relationship with math.

Machines to Materials

I just watched two PBS NOVA shows that I must share. One is called Making Stuff: Smaller. The other is Making Stuff: Stronger. There are other Making Stuff shows I haven’t watched yet.

Check these out! You can watch them for free online (at least right now you can).

As an educator and a parent, these videos get me all fired up. Young people should be learning about cutting edge science and math, not just the stuff of textbooks and standards. I want to show these to students and then I’d expect to hear them talking about wanting to be a chemist, material scientist, or nanotechnologist when they grow up.

My favorite part of Making Stuff: Smaller was the concept of starting by using a machine to complete a task, and then evolving to using a material to accomplish the same task. This is a key feature of miniaturization, which is what allows us to have laptops and cellphones, among other things, today. Computer processing went from giant rooms of vacuum tubes to silicon chips, but the story I liked the most was the journey from behemoth pendulum clocks to quartz watches. If this makes no sense to you, watch the video.

Another awesome story in Making Stuff: Smaller is about driving a tiny robot around inside someone’s eyeball to deliver medicine. Holy cow!

Making Mistakes

Here's a TED Radio Hour show featured on NPR entitled "Making Mistakes". Excellent, and very relevant to mathematics education and life in general.