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 …

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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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

Fun with Mathematics

My colleague's previous post, Math is Creative, and a chance encounter with an old book necessitated by some home shelving issues caused me to rethink my topic for this post. It's time to visit/revisit the enjoyment inherent in mathematics. Too many students 'see' math as not enjoyable and only existing in school. I'm sad to …

Math is creative.

There should be no such thing as boring mathematics. - Edsger Dijkstra In looking at the results of the math mindset surveys my students completed last quarter, I was pleasantly surprised that, compared to a mix of responses to the statement “Math is creative.” on the pre-survey, my students (a mix of pre- and in-service …

Thinking from Data

I teach graduate math methods, and I try to include instructional technology into the curriculum.  Most of these students have familiarity with technology, but upon closer examination I find some are thinking primarily of communication technology – email, social media, or searching on the web. They don’t think of technology as a tool to fundamentally …

Attending to students’ funds of knowledge in the mathematics classroom

There is divine beauty in learning... To learn means to accept the postulate that life did not begin at my birth. Others have been here before me, and I walk in their footsteps. The books I have read were composed by generations of fathers and sons, mothers and daughters, teachers and disciples. I am the …