Anything that is more inclusive is a great idea – wish you used the plural though for those of us in the rest of the world :)
#iteachmaths !

Spot. On.

While I have a certain allegiance to “#MTBoS” now, that wasn’t always the case.

Take the day I was invited to share at an NCTM Regionals mini-keynote-a-thon opening session about the #MTBoS… when I saw the names of the other folks who would be sharing brief talks about this math community, my honest-to-goodness first thought about being invited was… am I “in” the #MTBoS “enough” to speak about it amongst these other mathies who seem to be “in” it… “more”…?

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Through this community, I have gotten to know so many folks whose work I respect and whose brains I love. I think a more inclusive hashtag will help those who are curious to know that this community is for you and is about you! Period!

I revised this comment three times in my head but where I’m stuck at is “Meh”?

The MTBoS means a lot to a lot of people if you just start using #iteachmath no one is going to unfollow you cause you are Dan. But I think the call to retire is unnecessary and maybe even a little thoughtless to the people who put a crapload of work in to it.

From,
A person who literally hasn’t tweeted about math is years but still belongs to the community

Redux: https://blog.mrmeyer.com/2013/the-gathering-of-the-high-council-of-the-math-teacher-bloggers/

My knee-jerk reaction to this idea is filled with trepidation. How long until the #iteachmath feels clique-ish, exclusive, and all the things that the #mtbos has come to be in the eyes of many twitter users? There are over 270 math teacher blogs on the search engine (fishing4tech.com/mtbos) and currently 605 people who have self-identified with the #mtbos in the informal directory (bit.ly/mtbosdirectory).

To me, the hashtag will not have long-term effect on inclusivity; it’s up to the people who are coming to the tag and participating, lurking, or randomly stumbling onto it and pondering its usefulness. The #mtbos had an added scapegoat in that it was (and is) a clumsy abbreviation, but I have seen that the real hesitation surrounding the tag is how to join in, at what level one feels that they belong, and how to contribute.

Rather than re-working a hashtag and starting anew, I would propose that we spend more time around making the space feel inclusive, all while continuing to foster the relationships that have been established /because of/ that silly little abbreviation.

Whaaaaat? ?? Change #MTBoS? ??? I have been on twitter for just over a year and I have only just recently (ie. In the last few weeks) started thinking I’ve got to start using this hash tag and make more if an effort to join in on and participate in this “community’ I am just beginning to know and understand. .. heck, truly,the more I hear about #MTBoS the I want to be a part if it… heck! Surely I would have participated a year ago had I known what it meant! (Seiously) Don’t go changin. .. oh wait… yeah, I see your point now. True story.

There’s a lot of good in this post. Despite your efforts, it doesn’t seem to me you’re going to change what this community calls itself, but I think you are succeeding in getting many, many people to reaffirm a basic commitment to inclusivity. That’s a norm worth reaffirming. Kudos, for real.

I have two contributions to this discussion.

You often call out people for “telling others how to use the internet,” or “telling others how to mtbos.” On your blog, you’ve critiqued people for musing about the best or most appropriate direction for the iteachmath community to head towards. I’ve heard this from you when I’ve talked about the writing I most like to read, or if I’ve talked about things I wish were present in the community.

I’m not big on rules. From my point of view, there’s nothing procedurally wrong with this post. But I think that if you’re in the business of telling a community what to call itself, you should probably also be OK with people talking about what they like/don’t like about what’s going on in said community. Because, along with everything else in this post, you absolutely are telling people how to use their internet.

The second point is about scale. A common assumption in edtech, edu research, publishing, etc. is that if it’s good, you’ve got to scale it. An author I like, writing about ethics, once called this a “maximizing rationality.” I like that phrase. If something is good, it’s best to have as much of it as you can. If it’s great, everyone should have it.

I sometimes think that a rejection of scale is an important part of a classroom teacher’s perspective. It’s hard to justify a concern for scale while remaining in the classroom. If I have a good idea, shouldn’t I try to spread that idea as widely as possible? That’s a line of thinking that leads straight out of the k-12 school door.

This is a long way of saying that inclusivity isn’t the same as scale. On twitter I saw you distinguishing between getting people in the door vs. greeting them once they’re inside. I like that.

Some good things are better when they’re scaled, and others aren’t. I don’t know what would happen if we tried to self-consciously optimize the iteachmath community for further scale. (And it seems to me that this is precisely what you’re calling for, implicitly and maybe explicitly.) Maybe it would mean more math teachers being happy and included. Maybe it would lead to splintering and confusion. Honestly, I don’t know, and I don’t know how to think about this.

Me, I’m suspicious of jumps to scale. I think that, especially with an organic community, it’s best not to push size too fast. Norms get lost, character is swallowed up, people get frustrated. It would be an interesting conversation to have, but it’s one that would be very similar to chats that you’ve called out and critiqued in the past, on the grounds that it’s telling people what to do.

Ultimately, though, there’s a lot that I admire here. And not just what’s here, but what you’ve posted in the past to reaffirm the importance of inclusivity in these spaces.

What are your thoughts on the following norms of the #MTBoS community? As an elementary teacher I follow across many different disciplines and, hands down, the big names in #MTBoS are the most selective about who they will follow. I think this has been good for the hashtag– shared vision and norms are easier to develop and follow through on in a small, tight-knit community. The resulting discussions and instructional shifts have had a significant impact on the way a lot of people teach math. But, it also contributes to people feeling left out. In particular I think about this when someone in #MTBoS laments the lack of elementary teacher representation. High profile people on #MTBoS are unlikely to follow elementary teachers because our feeds are not math focused enough. If you want to learn about math in our classrooms you have to be willing to read the tweets about literacy, science, and social studies too.

I need to think a lot more about this.

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Wow, interesting stuff going on during my summer twitter break! My first reaction reading this was “dayum…way to ruffle some feathers, Dan.” My second reaction was that what you’re saying definitely makes some sense…but my thoughts took me beyond just the name of the online community to the fact that there’s a “community” at all. I guess I feel that the *community* should be all people online who care about math education and the *hash tag* should just be the way we categorize our comments on twitter, facebook, instagram, etc… By saying “this is an online community” it automatically makes it something you have to become a part of…and it doesn’t matter how inclusive a group thinks they are…there will always be those that feel they never belong.

I know I’ve said I’m a member of #mtbos before and I probably believe it to some extent, but ultimately I’ve just treated the hashtag as what it is…an categorizing tool. I think if the hash tag were something that didn’t indicate a group of people but something anyone can use, then more people would use it. I don’t know if #iteachmath is the best…but I do feel it would be more conducive to the way I tweet about math than #mtbos.

That being said, I’ll still continue using #mtbos but I’ll definitely see where the new hashtag goes.

I fall into the category of being uncomfortable using #iteachmath since I’m not a professional classroom teacher and it feels presumptuous. I also don’t love having the hashtags split into 3 or more different ones to scan to just find the interesting things to read.

Which brings me to my first thought, “Why not #mathchat”? Its already there, being used and even more “twitterish”. Its actually the tag I first found when I joined. Right now its also has a bunch of spam, but if you want to be inclusive and inviting why not post there and create connections?

I think there are also some fundamental issues with any kind of real expansion that make it very hard. As a thought experiment, imagine a hashtag with 10,000’s of users where new posts were being generated every minute instead of every 10-30 minutes. I think keeping up
and forging connections would be much harder. My feeling is that #mtbos has already reached this point. The phenomena multiple people have described of not belonging and not getting responses to me is explained as follows. The “core” people have all followed each other and formed a network. When they interact with twitter they’re looking at the people they follow rather than generic tag much more often. The tag has spawned a smaller network that has become semi-separate. And this isn’t anyone’s fault. You can’t really maintain a friendship/relation with more than a smallish number of folks. For most people this becomes unsustainable in the 100’s. I’d expect this process to occur anywhere the group size reaches a certain tipping point.

The flip side of scaling is something alluded to earlier when discussing mathchat. Any larger tag will eventually attract more commercialized attention. If #iteachmath really took off, I’d expect all the spam in #mathchat to eventually migrate there as well.

All of which is to say, I’m hoping any push doesn’t make it even harder to connect.

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I had facetiously posted about googling what MTBoS is the first night this was up, but having thought about it more, it’s actually an important thing. MTBoS is google-able in a way #iteachmath will never be. If you search for “iteachmath” it’s so broad as to return so many things. Searching for MTBoS returns the huge wealth of things created by people who want to affiliate it with that tag. That’s not something simple to ignore.

Dan, I really appreciated that your inspiration to write the first post was inclusivity. I’ve been thinking about the whole thing for a few days now. I’m relatively new to Twitter, and I am an elementary school teacher. I did lurk around #MTBoS for awhile, and it took me some time to figure out even what it was. Some of that was probably magnified by the fact that I was so new to Twitter in general. I did wonder about how to join. I did assume at first that there was some kind of body that bestowed the title, and I also assumed that I wouldn’t be able to join because I am not a blogger. At some point, there was a Twitter request made (I’m not even sure by whom, @ExploreMTBoS maybe?) to add ourselves (as math teachers) to a #MTBoS google doc. That prompted me to ask how one joins, and I received a very friendly reply that anyone is welcome to consider themselves a member. I remember both the feeling of being on the outside (and envious) and then feeling on the inside-at least in a beginner sort of way (and included). I imagine that many of us who were not a part of the original birth of #MTBoS felt like outsiders at first. So I guess the central question is how do experienced Twitter math people help new Twitter math people to feel welcome in the Twitter sphere. Since your post came out, I have come across a number of people who were already working on that question, which is great.

I know you are getting a lot of blowback, and I am not a part of the community enough to understand all of the politics, who is in charge of what, or even to know about the many things that I hear have been done to be more inclusive. But as one of your Twitter followers, I am glad you brought it up. It was the first time I had heard anyone acknowledge this kind of experience with MTBos. (Not that I’m suggesting this hasn’t been done before. Perhaps it has been done many times, this is just the first time it’s gotten to me.) It certainly got me thinking, and it also helped me to learn more about the MTBoS backstory. So thanks.

Provocative thought exercise.

Q: “Hey folks, lots of people have told me that they didn’t try ‘difficult math’ because they didn’t know what it was or weren’t sure they were welcome. Can we come up with a name that’s more descriptive and has less chance of being off-putting, to use in addition to ‘difficult math’? ”

A: “I’m not intimidated by ‘difficult math’ and neither are these other people.” (without a proposal for welcoming those who *are* intimidated)

A: “I’m not intimidated and neither are these other people. Therefore the intimidated people should stop being intimidated.”

A: “When a choice has to be made either to inconvenience established participants who already feel welcome and like they belong, or newcomers, I vote to inconvenience newcomers.”

A: “Your new proposal doesn’t include me.” (without an alternate proposal that addresses both their own needs and the intimidation factor)

Some ideas:
– What do we each do to welcome math students into math itself? Are we using the same techniques to welcome math teachers into online collaboration? Why or why not?

– When we expect our students to be resilient in thinking about things from unfamiliar perspectives or in uncomfortable ways, how do we support them? Do we expect the same from ourselves? Do students and teachers have equal responsibilities in this? Do new teachers and experienced teachers have equal responsibilities in this? Do people who are included and people who are excluded have equal responsibilities in this?

BONUS QUESTION
– what can this conversation help us understand about the inclusion of women, queer and trans people, people of colour, people with disabilities… as math students, as math teachers, as mathematicians?