Here is how I’m voting in the upcoming NCTM board election. Ballots close 10/31. You should vote too.

There are few issues in mathematics education that both matter a lot and that NCTM can directly affect. One issue in that subset matters most to me:

I care how well NCTM accesses the capacity of its members to help each other develop continuously as educators.

NCTM has the largest store of teaching knowledge of any math education organization in the world. Its 70,000 members comprise hundreds of thousands of years of math education experience. But NCTM accesses that capacity only sporadically. Fewer than ten times yearly at face-to-face conferences. Twelve times per year in its five journals. Occasionally in books and blog posts.

The only medium that will allow an NCTM member in Scranton, PA, to help another member develop continuously in San Diego, CA, is the internet. My tweeting and blogging colleagues know exactly what I’m talking about. They know the exhilaration of asking a question from a veteran and getting an answer in minutes. They know what it’s like to read someone’s interesting idea one day, try it out the next, and then offer the originator some useful feedback.

They’re developing, and developing each other, continuously. They don’t want to wait for conferences, journals, books, or blog posts.

So how am I voting? A few years ago, I’d vote for any candidate who even mentioned the internet in her candidacy statement. Now I’m looking for people who have a plan for helping NCTM’s members develop each other continuously. I’m looking for people who seem receptive to the experiments in online professional development Zak Champagne, Mike Flynn, and I put together annually under the name “ShadowCon.” I’m looking for people who understand that NCTM’s membership is underutilized for most of the year.

Here are promising excerpts from the candidates’ statements.

Robert Q. Berry III (President-Elect) [Twitter]:

Membership is a major challenge facing the Council. NCTM must rethink its membership model, working to ensure that longtime members continue to value NCTM while showing potential members the value of associating themselves with NCTM. This can done by tapping into their interests in social media and other digital technologies to promote interactive communities of professionals. Such efforts broaden the Council’s space for professional learning while maintaining meaningful engagement with the membership.

Nora Ramirez (President-Elect):

NCTM has the knowledge, experience, and skills to support both national and state affiliates in developing the abilities to advocate effectively for issues that are critical to them. Affiliates interested in this initiative would meet both face-to-face and online to learn, plan, and collaboratively develop or identify resources.

David Ebert (Director, High School):

NCTM needs to consider all forms of professional learning, including electronic learning opportunities, sustained yearlong professional learning, and joint professional learning opportunities personalized for the needs of the teachers within an affiliate.

Jason Slowbe (Director, High School) [Twitter, Web]:

NCTM should develop an online platform offering members a living portfolio for their professional development. NCTM already attracts top-notch speakers; now it should empower speakers with tools for building a following and facilitating year-round development. Attending sessions should be the beginning, not the end, of the conference experience. NCTM should enable attendees to pin, share, and discuss resources from within and beyond NCTM, including conference handouts, blog posts, articles, and student work. Integration with affiliate conferences and other stakeholders would connect teachers and grow membership organically. NCTM should leverage both the power of collaboration and its unique position as the world’s largest math education organization to influence more teachers and students.

Rick A. Hudson (Director, At Large):

Teachers today communicate in very different ways from the past, and NCTM must make use of the new media while building on its current strengths to reach a wider audience. For example, the quality of NCTM’s conferences is one of the Council’s greatest strengths, and we must think proactively about ways to share content from conference sessions virtually to reach a larger group of the membership and to extend the conference experience for those in attendance.

DeAnn Huinker (Director, At Large) [Twitter]:

A task force on building the next generation of teachers can consider resources, tools, and innovative ways to reach out to prospective teachers, such as providing access to blogs and online mentorships.

Daniel J. Teague (Director, At Large):

NCTM should take the lead in creating online and downloadable video courses (see Jo Boaler’s How to Learn Mathematics and Scott Page’s Model Thinking) to be used by individual teachers and departments for extensive work in these areas.

Desha L. Williams (Director, At Large):

Maintaining and expanding membership is a challenge for NCTM. The age of technology has created avenues for teachers to access information that was once available only within NCTM resources.

Vanessa Cleaver (Director, At Large):

Although I am a huge fan of Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and other social media, I believe that these sources are to some extent now meeting the needs of educators for interaction with one another and exchange of information in non—face-to-face settings.

That’s what matters to me and how I’m voting. What about you?

Featured Comments

• Steve Weimar outlines NCTM’s current efforts towards helping teacher develop continuously online.
• Cal Armstrong wants to see current or recent teachers in leadership positions
• Brandon Dorman would like to see NCTM accredit its members using technology like Mozilla’s Open Badges.

Zach Cresswell:

If you had told me that it would take me five years of teaching to figure out how to mentally leave work at work then I might not have continued in this career. I’ve gotten incrementally better at it each year but this year I’ve committed to prioritizing it. Here are a few things I’ve learned that help me do that. I hope you can, especially if you’re just starting out, find a piece of advice that will help you live a more balanced life.

I’ve grown to admire a kind of teacher I used to disregard — the teacher who knows she could create a better lesson than the one she taught last year, who knows she could help a student bring a B to a B+ with after-school tutoring, who knows she could do wonders coaching the basketball team, and who makes a principled choice not to do any of that.

That principle is:

It’s better for me to do 90% of what I know I can do this year if that 10% I save for myself means I’ll still be a teacher next year.

Cresswell’s post exemplifies that self-discipline. His post is practical also. He offers four of his best strategies for making teaching sustainable. Comments are closed here, but I hope you’ll load up his blog post with strategies of your own. This job can’t have enough of them.

I didn’t think there was a useful K12 math objective in bottle flipping. My commenters served their usual function of setting me straight.

I was asking the question, “Can you predict whether or not a bottle will land?” A modeling problem.

Commenters like Meaghan asked the question, “What conditions will set yourself up for success in bottle flipping?”

How much water in the bottle? What kind of angle on the toss? Clockwise or counterclockwise? These are statistical questions.

Paul Jorgens followed that angle with his class:

It started with an argument in class last week about the optimal amount of water in the bottle. Should it be 1/4 filled? 1/3? Just below 1/2? I told the group that we could use our extra period to try to answer the question. We met and designed an experiment. We thought about problems like skill of tosser, variation in bottles, etc. We started with 32 bottles filled to varying levels. During 20 minutes of class, 32 students flipped bottles 4,220 times. We the all filled in our data on a Google Sheet.

[..]

I meet again next week with the small group that had the idea. I think they want to produce something for school news. Did we answer the question about how much water to put in the bottle?

Check out the graph of their data.

The Paper Helicopter is a similar exercise in experimental design. These activities come from the same template. If we understand that template, we can swap lots of different questions into the experiment, including those that seem most interesting to students in this moment.

We can teach students how to use mathematical tools to answer questions that interest them. We can also assign detentions. If there’s any middle ground, I’m not seeing it on Twitter right now.

Featured Tweet

.@ddmeyer thanks for the idea about bottle flipping you Tweeted last week. Tried my own version today and Ss loved it!

— Jasper Fox Sr. (@JasperFoxSR) October 17, 2016

BTW. Here’s a Desmos activity you can use to facilitate data collection in your class. Your students add their data on the first screen. Then they see the sum of their class’s data on the second screen.