First of all, most of the courses I teach are fully online, and most of my students are graduate students who ‘attend’ our university while juggling their full-time jobs as teachers and about half are parents too. Expecting them to place my courses as their highest priority every day is unrealistic Most of these K-12 … Continue reading THOUGHTS ON THE NEW SCHOOL YEAR – 2020
Educate Yourself this Summer
It’s been quite a school year; when the year started in September who among us would have thought we’d be teaching remotely, that some of our friends would be envious of the relative permanence of our jobs, and parents would admit how difficult it is to teach and engage their children for at least 6 … Continue reading Educate Yourself this Summer
Social Justice Mathematics
I’m providing information and access for two websites which can help you use mathematics to make ‘sense’ of the ‘perfect storm’ of current events. Perhaps you’ve completed this spring’20 semester and are wondering how you can begin the new term in September without ignoring what happened the preceding semester. I suggest you explore SlowRevealGraphs (yes, … Continue reading Social Justice Mathematics
Sense-making and reasoning in the time of Corona Part II
In a recent blog post I urged teachers to focus on developing students’ sense-making and reasoning skills rather than adding new content. I shared some personal favorites tools for doing this and today I would like to share a few more. https://playwithyourmath.com/ is a teacher run blog that asks students to solve visual puzzles such … Continue reading Sense-making and reasoning in the time of Corona Part II
Mindset
When I taught my first class in the 1960’s, my methods instructor and assigned classroom teacher gave me few directions, so I taught as I remember being taught when I was in high school. I lectured, I thought telling/showing was teaching, and I assigned lots of homework problems. Times have changed, thank goodness. Brain and … Continue reading Mindset
Sense-making and reasoning in the time of Corona
Here in Illinois, we found out last week that our schools will be closed for the rest of the academic year. With this announcement, many parents and teachers are worried that students will not learn anything new and will fall behind. In this blog I would like to encourage all of us to use this … Continue reading Sense-making and reasoning in the time of Corona
Graphs and COVID-19
I was surprised to see an article in the March’20 issue of Forbes magazine titled, “Is Poor Math Literacy Making It Harder for People to Understand COVID-19 Coronavirus? The article was inspired by a tweet from economist Julie Pierce, “The longer the crisis goes on and the more comments I read, the more I wonder … Continue reading Graphs and COVID-19
Math and movement
Most of you know me as a math teacher educator in the secondary education department at National Louis University, but as of about five years ago I have looked at math with a dual lens - secondary and early childhood. Four and a half years ago, my daughter was born, and so now when I … Continue reading Math and movement
Dynamic Statistics
I’d like to use my blog post this month to introduce CODAP and TUVA; more about them below. As a math educator I’ve often considered the challenges of teaching statistics. Simply said, should we stress understanding statistics by examining relatively small data sets, calculating basic statistics (e.g. mean, median, mode, standard deviation, etc.), and examining … Continue reading Dynamic Statistics
Notice & Wonder with Padlet & Dotstorming
In your mathematics classroom, are you giving students opportunities to think or taking away their need to think? As a high school math teacher, I encountered many initiatives that helped my classroom be more student-centered. When I first started teaching, cooperative learning was making a comeback, but I did not get much direction on how … Continue reading Notice & Wonder with Padlet & Dotstorming
