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"Punches are no longer being pulled." -MSNBC
"At each other throats." -CNN
"Ugly as a wedding dress inside a slaughterhouse inside a divorced vegetarian." -Fox News

As you can see, the 2012 debate season is heating up. And by debate season, I am obviously referring to the debate of how best to pose the following math problem to students:
Draw a rectangle on a square grid. An example 9 by 3 rectangle is drawn for you below. Draw one diagonal. How many squares does the diagonal pass through? Develop a rule to determine the number of squares a diagonal passes through for any rectangle of any size.
First, the back story.
The players
On August 12, 2011 Kate Nowak posted a seemingly innocent post on her blog sharing this problem. On par with my general google reader habits, I read this post about six weeks later. I liked the problem. Liked it very much. When I got the call from Gallup, it got my vote for being a ...... [ Read the rest of this story ]
Here's slides for today's session which will focus on doing some math and reflecting on the habits you use. We'll then create a lesson and/or an assessment around mathematical habits of mind.

Careful, there are a number of really good problems here. :)
This weekend I'm up in North Country working with teachers from all over Saskatchewan at the Saskatchewan Understands Mathematics Conference. Random? Sure. Thank you twitter and thank you @park_star for organizing a fantastic two days. After a fantastic opening talk by James Tanton, I led a 2 hour sessions this morning titled Beyond Polya: Making Mathematical Habits of Mind an Integral Part of the Classroom. Here are the Powerpoint slides (I will warn you that a few of the animations did not export correctly, but it's readable). 


In short, we walked through my ten mathematical habits of mind, brainstormed what this meant to us and how we could see and teach this in our classroom, and did some math.

Starting with a personal reflection, I felt that the session went well overall. We did, however, go too quickly and we didn't spend enough time doi...... [ Read the rest of this story ]
A visual of digital technology my 5th and 6th grade students have learned, used, explored, and/or benefited from this year. I'm proud to say that I'm continuing to increase my ratio of

using technology because it helps solve an existing problem : using technology because it's available

By the way, I created this as part of a Technology Through Time presentation to parents given by ten teachers intended to give a brief overview and scope of how technology is used at different ages and in different classes.



Below are some lightly edited notes from the most recent Escape meeting at Willard Middle School in Berkeley. Our next meeting is tentatively set for Saturday, June 2nd somewhere in San Francisco.
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Escape from the Textbook meeting: March 24, 2012

Introductions

We spent the first part of the session exploring the game of Set. Over the course of the morningthere were a few other games/ideas mentioned including Eleusis, Attributes Blocks (similarto set except with physical blocks), SpotIt and Ricochet Robot.

We played the game for a bit, but then worked on solving andcreating mathematical puzzles. Below are some examples:
* What is the maximum number of cards you can have without aset?
* Can you make a strip (a train) where any three cards nextto one another are share the same number of
...... [ Read the rest of this story ]
Welcome to part three in my N part series on technology. In part 1, I bashed Smart Boards. In part 2, I shared my Christmas wish list for improving homework logs. Since my birthday is on the 28th, I guess this could be considered my technology birthday wish list.

Right now I'm finishing up my statistics unit with both my fifth and sixth graders (moving this unit from 6th to 5th grade, so I'm doing something similar in all of my classes at the moment). I've never taught a full fledged statistics unit, and it's going really well.  Here's an overview.

The project
Our hook was this slick movie by National Geographic called 7 Billion: Are you Typical?  We then posed the following question: Are you a typical 5th/6th grader (throughout, I'm trying to keep the idea of "a typical 6th grader" light and humorous with the understanding that this is kind of a silly question)? Kids brainstormed topics and questions that would help answer this question, creating categories from after school activities to the environment. They learned how to write good survey questions and how to use...... [ Read the rest of this story ]
Last post I talked about the difference between figuring out how to use a technology that is given to you versus looking for a technology to solve an existing problem.  Then I went all Negative Netty on interactive whiteboards. Today I'm going to talk about searching for a technology to solve an existing problem.

My students complete a short homework log every night (ah, the advantages of being in a community where everyone has computers and internet access). I use this to track how much they complete (important, since I only want them working for 30 minutes and often (purposefully) give them assignments I don't expect to be finished or don't really have a finish).  I also use this to help prepare for my lesson the following day, get a sense of what questions they have, and how well they understood the assignment. Finally, this is yet another space for kids to communicate with me.


Anyway, the tech issues:

  • Right now students populate a google form and these data are transferred into a google spreadsheet that I look
...... [ Read the rest of this story ]
The #pencilchat discussion on twitter has rekindled something I've been thinking about a lot...

There's a big difference between being handed some technology and then figuring out how it's useful and having a problem and finding (or creating) a technology to solve this problem.

Let me get my Interactive SmartBoard bashing out of the way.  Just to be clear, my definition of interactive does not include a tool that:
  • lives at the front of the room
  • must be connected to a computer to work (and even then...) 
  • freaks out when it is touched by more than two people at a time
That said, I am still trying to find ways to make this (expensive) thing that covers my whiteboard more than just a whiteboard that occasionally spontaneously erases everything (it's the only time kids are allowed to use the word "dumb" in my class). A few weeks ago I got together with three other great teachers to pow wow how smart boards could be useful.  In the end, we spent a bunch of time sharing "here's something else that's kind of neat" but someone's insightful question at the end asking if we'd learned anything brought everything back i...... [ Read the rest of this story ]
I led a workshop this past weekend at CMC-North Asilomar (this is a math conference for those of you who do normal weekend things like gardening and watching football).

Making the Common Core Standards of Mathematical Practice More than an Afterthought

This was the second iteration of the talk I gave last month in Palm Springs. About 25 people showed up, a number I was pretty happy with considering it was the last session of the day (a beautiful one at that). I feel the Palm Springs session went fairly well, but that this talk was more polished and more interactive. Three or four more times doing this and it'll start approaching good.

One of the recurring themes of the talk was promoting productive failure and a culture of working on hard problems. With this in mind, I'd like to share the critical feedback I received (thanks to those who took the time to write feedback):
Give more sources for 'good problems'
To be honest,...... [ Read the rest of this story ]
One would think (and hope) there's been a bit of thought put into creating a framework for expectations of students at different grade levels (the Common Core Standards being the most recent incarnation). We don't just say "Here's all the stuff kids should learn. Make sure they are done by the time they finish high school."

Does this same differentiated framework happen with teacher development? In my experience, the answer is definitively no. I've never been given a choice during school/district run PD based on my experience/expertise. I rarely see PD that focuses on a teacher at a particular place in their career (some conferences have sessions specifically geared towards new teachers, but the idea of a session specifically geared towards a fourth year teacher just seems funny).

...which begs the question: Why is it normal to talk about something being fourth grade content, but ludicrous to talk about something being fourth year teaching content?

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