I’m on a shortened schedule at NCTM this year but I’m making the most of it. Here’s where you’ll find me.

Thursday

How to Present at NCTM

Robert Kaplinsky and I would like to help you propose a session and and present it at NCTM. Robert has served on the NCTM program committee and will help you understand how proposals are evaluated. I’ve presented professionally for nearly a decade and will offer my own playbook for designing and delivering presentations. Our motives are selfish. So many of you have stories to tell and insights to offer. Our profession needs them out of your head and into all of ours.

The Desmos Booth

Stop by the exhibit hall and say hi sometime between 3PM – 4PM. Tell me what you’re working on.

ShadowCon v3.0

For the last two years, ShadowCon has functioned as a sort of research and development arm of NCTM’s program committee. Zak Champagne, Mike Flynn, and I study an idea on a small scale (filming every presentation, for example, or giving every presenter a webpage for follow-up discussion) and NCTM uses our data to decide if they should expand the idea to more presenters. This year, we have four exceptional presenters — Cathy Yenca, Anurupa Ganguly, Kassia Omohundro Wedekind, Geoff Krall — offering provocative ideas and we’ll study a new template for conference follow-up.

Friday

Desmos Happy Hour

Even before I worked at Desmos, this was my favorite happy hour. Great energy. Great people from all across NCTM’s membership. Come for a free drink. Stay for the math trivia. Doors open at 7PM. Trivia starts at 8PM.

Saturday

Math is Power, not Punishment

This is the last time I’ll give this talk, the accumulation of a lot of thinking and designing around Guershon Harel’s concept of “intellectual need.” I’ll start by pointing out that the software engineers at Desmos and the summer school Algebra II students I worked with in Berkeley had very different answers to the question, “What would your life be like without variables?” Then we’ll figure out how to bridge those answers.

There is a 95% chance that each of my sessions will be filmed. I mention that in case you can’t make the trip to San Antonio and also because, even if you can make the trip, there are lots of amazing sessions in each time slot.

In the comments, let us know what you’re excited to do and see at NCTM.

BTW. If you’re feeling even a little bit intimidated by the deluge of people and ideas at conferences like NCTM, I recommend you read Nic Petty’s 10 hints to make the most of teaching and academic conferences.

Bonus. In an example of the creative forces that can flow through tweeting and blogging communities of practice like this one, Meredith Thompson commented on my last post that:

… looking at climate change over a short period of time gives one picture, but enlarging the frame to geological scale shows great fluctuations in temperature. This argument becomes “fuel” for people who claim that global warming is not a problem — yet the current dramatic increase (sometimes called the hockey stick) convinces many people (myself included) that action is needed.

This seemed like a job for a Desmos activity. Here is one where students crop climate data in two different ways, using those selections to make two opposite claims about the data, experiencing firsthand how easy it is to distort data.