Month: January 2018

Total 3 Posts

Lonely Math Teachers

Check out this lonely math teacher on Twitter:

Taylor registered her Twitter account this month. She’s brand new. She’s posted this one tweet alone. In this tweet, she’s basically tapping the Math Teacher Twitter microphone asking, “Is this thing on?” and so far the answer is “Nope.” She’s lonely. That’s bad for her and bad for us.

It’s bad for her because we could be great for her. For the right teacher, Twitter is the best ambient, low-intensity professional development and community you’ll find. Maybe Twitter isn’t as good for development or community as a high-intensity, three-year program located at your school site. But if you want to get your brain spinning on an interesting problem of practice in the amount of time it takes you to tap an app, Twitter is the only game in town. And Taylor is missing out on it.

It’s bad for us because she could be great for us. Our online communities on Twitter are as susceptible to groupthink as any other. No one knows how many interesting ways Taylor could challenge and provoke us, how many interesting ideas she has for teaching place value. We would have lost some of your favorite math teachers on Twitter if they hadn’t pushed through lengthy stretches of loneliness. Presumably, others didn’t persevere.

So we’d love to see fewer lonely math teachers on Twitter, for our sake and for theirs.

Last year, Matt Stoodle Baker invited people to volunteer every day of the month to check the #mtbos hashtag (one route into this community) and make sure people weren’t lonely there. Great idea. I’m signed up for the 13th day of every month, but ideally, we could distribute the work across more people and across time. Ideally, we could easily distinguish the lonely math teachers from the ones who already experience community and development on Twitter, and welcome them.

I’m not the first person to want this.

So here is a website I spent a little time designing that can help you identify and welcome lonely math teachers on Twitter: lonelymathteachers.com.

It does three things:

  • It searches several math teaching hashtags for tweets that a) haven’t yet received any replies, b) aren’t replies themselves, and c) aren’t retweets. Those people are lonely! Reply to them!
  • It puts an icon next to teachers who have fewer than 100 tweets or who registered their account in the last month. These people are especially lonely.
  • It creates a weekly tally of the five “best” welcomers on Math Teacher Twitter, where “best” is defined kind of murkily.

That’s it! As with everything else I’m up to in my life, I have no idea if this idea will work. But I love this place and the idea was actually going to bore a hole right out of my dang head if I didn’t do something with it.

BTW. Thanks to Sam Shah, Grace Chen, Matt Stoodle, and Jackie Stone for test driving the page and offering their feedback. Thanks to Denis Lantsman for help with the code.

Related

18 Jan 22:

The Teaching Muscle I Want to Strengthen in 2018.

[a/k/a 3-Act Task: Suitcase Circle]

It’s the muscle that connects my capacity for noticing the world to my capacity for creating mathematical experiences for children. (I should also take some time in 2018 to learn how muscles work.)

By way of illustration, this was my favorite tweet of 2017.

Right there you have an image created by Brittany Wright, a chef, and shared with the 200,000 people who follow her on Instagram. Loads of people before Ilona had noticed it, but she connected that noticing to her capacity for creating mathematical experiences for children. She surveyed her Twitter followers, asking them to name their favorite banana, receiving over one thousand responses. Then on her blog she posed all kinds of avenues for her students’ investigation — distributions, probability, survey design, factor analysis, etc.

That skill — taking an interesting thing and turning it into a challenging thing — is one of teaching’s “unnatural acts.” Who does that? Not civilians. Teachers do. And I want to get awesome at it.

But Ilona ran a marathon and I want to run some wind sprints. I need quick exercises for strengthening that muscle. So here are my exercises for 2018:

I’m going to pause when I notice mathematical structures in the world. Like flying out of the United terminal in San Antonio at last year’s NCTM where I (and I’m sure a bunch of other math teachers) noticed this “Suitcase Circle.”

Then I’ll capture my question in a picture or a video. Kind of like the one above, except pictures like that one exist in abundance online.

Civilians capture scenes in order to preserve as much information as possible. That’s natural. But I’ll excerpt the scene, removing some information in order to provoke curiosity. Perhaps this photo, which makes me wonder, “How many suitcases are there?”

In order to gauge the curiosity potential of the image, I’ll share the media I captured with my community. Maybe with my question attached, like Ilona did. Maybe without a question so I can see the interesting questions other people wonder. You may find my photos on Twitter. You may find them at my pet website, 101questions.

I want to get to a place where that muscle is so strong that I’m hyper-observant of math in the world around me, and turning those observations into curious mathematical experiences for children is like a reflexive twitch.

(Plus, that muscle will be more fun to strengthen in 2018 than literally any other muscle in my body.)

BTW. Check out the 3-Act Task I created for the Suitcase Circle. It includes the following reveal, which I’m pretty proud of.

BTW. The suitcase circle later turned into Complete the Arch, a Desmos activity, which has some really nice math going on.

[Suitcase Circle photo by Scott Ball]

Featured Comment

Ilona Vashchyshyn :

I would just add that we shouldn’t forget that the classroom is a world within a world for us to notice, and that while many great, unforgettable tasks are based on interesting phenomena that we’ve observed or collected outside of school, on a day-to-day basis, high-impact tasks are probably more likely to be rooted in our observations and interactions with our students (in fact, even the banana tweet and post were sparked by a conversation with a student who was eating what was, to me, an exceptionally green banana). They tend not to be as flashy, but can have just as much impact because they’re tailored to the kids, norms, relationships, and histories in our classrooms.

I Have Big Reservations About Chalkbeat’s Teaching Competition

At SXSW, Chalkbeat is hosting The Great American Teach Off:

Top Chef. Project Runway. The Voice. Live competition shows have introduced audiences to the worlds of cooking, fashion, and singing – and opened a window into the intricate craftsmanship that these industries demand. Now it’s time for one of America’s most under-recognized professions to get the same treatment. Hi, teachers!!

Two teams of math teachers will teach a lesson to a live audience and receive judgment from a panel of “teacher celebrities.”

I linked to that description on Twitter and people were unsparing in their criticism:

I agree with the spirit of those criticisms, and David Coffey’s in particular:

Good teaching requires complicated decision-making based on a teacher’s long-range knowledge of a student and of mathematics. We should reach for any opportunity to make those decisions transparent to the public, who will always benefit from more education about good education. But a live event with an audience you don’t know and can’t interact with individually will necessarily flatten “teaching” down to its most presentational aspects, down to teachers dressing up in costumes, down to Robin Williams standing on desks in Dead Poets Society.

Not good teaching.

I asked teachers what kind of TV show would do justice to the complexity of teaching, if The Voice and Top Chef were the wrong models. Jamie Garner and James Cleveland both suggested The Real World, which seems dead on to me.

https://twitter.com/jetpack/status/947513638943895552

The Real World a) isn’t a competition, b) allows for characters to develop over time, and crucially, c) isn’t a live event. It is edited. You don’t watch the cast members do anything mundane. In the case of teaching, we’d love for the public to understand that good teachers assess what students know and adjust their instruction in response. But no one wants to watch a class work quietly on a five-minute exit ticket in real time. So the show would edit quickly past students completing the assessment and straight to the teacher trying to make sense of a student’s thinking, involving the audience in that process.

The challenge I’d like to see the folks at Chalkbeat take up is how to make those invisible aspects of teaching — the work that takes place after the bell — visible to the public. The work of presenting is already teaching’s most visible aspect.

BTW. Jamie Garner expands on The Real World: Math Class.

2018 Jan 1. Chalkbeat’s Editor-in-Chief, Elizabeth Green, clarifies her rationale for launching the competition and responds to some concerns raised here and on Twitter. She describes lesson study as the touchstone for her Teach Off and how she’s had to alter that format to fit SXSW.

It’s a really interesting article, full of references to the education scholars who have inspired her work for a decade. But I still tend to think she and the members of her design team have underestimated the magnitude of those compromises and how they’ll distort the approximation of good instruction her audience will encounter.

2018 Jan 8. In a revised contest page the organizers have eliminated the competition and clarified other aspects.

Featured Comment

Organizer Elizabeth Green weighs in:

I’m weighing in late here, but in response to one of the above threads, we never intended to have the whole audience serve as the students. As we’ve clarified in our revised page, which has more specific language, we’ll have 7-10 adult audience volunteers serve as students. Imperfect as a representation, for sure, but we still think everyone will get something important out of the 20-minute instructional activity + the followup discussion — that “something important” being better understanding about the nature of teaching and math teaching in particular. And for the record, Dan, at the 1,000-person “Iron Chef”-style teach off in Japan that Akihiko described, the students were the teacher’s actual students, and they all sat onstage.